social media

Commissioner Lawrence Mute Office of the AU Special Rapporteur Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A version of this letter was also addressed to David Kaye, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Dear Sir, We, the undersigned organisations that work to promote freedom of expression offline and online across the globe, write to exp...

Every 66 seconds a post inciting hatred against Palestinians was shared on social media platforms in 2018. Almost half a million calls for violent actions and racist slurs were registered. From all the posts mentioning the term “Arabs”, 1 out of 10 contain an insult or an invitation to violence against Palestinians. These are some of the revelations included in the Index of Racism...

The headline in a media report of 23 March 2017 says “BJP’s social media campaign in Manipur was a hit”. According to the report, the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) kicked off a high-pitched social media campaign in Manipur on more than 100 WhatsApp groups, a number of Facebook pages, Twitter handles and Twitter channels. This proves to be true considering the result. Comparatively, in the 2...

“So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is 'in the past.' This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.” These words from Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne Gay are more or less the exact words a victim of...

For the last few years, I’ve worked in different corners of what can be generally be dubbed as the content moderation industry. First as a contractor, then as an employee for well-known social media platforms, where day-to-day work is intimately linked to crucial social outcomes in different parts of the world. The decisions made in that industry can decide what counts as a real identity, the...

This is an attempt to narrate the speak-out movement led by the Dalit-Bahujan women in Kerala. It is a social media-based (particularly through Facebook) campaign, that is still ongoing in Kerala, to narrativise the experiences of sexual harassment faced by Dalit-Bahujan women. These attacks had happened in their work place, within friends’ circles and political spaces. Surprisingly, the wome...

Here are some tips and insights on how to use social media for activism and movement building. These are learnings from the vocal and active African feminists who have used the internet and social media to amplify their causes. The fact that social media is nominally free to use – and we say nominally because we have to be aware that we provide our data to corporate bodies that own the social...

The undersigned organisations condemn the recent vicious attacks on environmental justice activists in South Africa. In one case, we are outraged at the reported murder on 11 July 2018 of Mr. D. Panza, an activist who had opposed a relocation of the community in KwaDube in KwaZulu Natal (KZN). KZN violence monitor Mary de Haas has reported that people living on this land have been informed by v...