New Social Media Practices: Potential for Development, Democracy, and Anti-democratic Practices

Abstract

Social media, like many other communication technologies, have varying uses across the domains of human development. In some sub-Saharan African countries, social media have greatly improved users’ access to culture, engagement with politics, and access to economic opportunity. In other countries, usually where regimes have made negligible investments in public information infrastructure, digital media have become powerful tools for social control. We analyse recent trends by presenting several cases of how social media are changing the work of foreign development assistance, the practice of democracy, and the methods of anti-democratic regime control. We offer country-specific examples of how these projects and processes work. But we also identify some of the cross-platform, multi-country social media applications that have gained significant traction, notably in the domain of election monitoring and mobile banking. We conclude that though it is premature to claim significant impact at this stage, and poor infrastructure still poses serious challenges, social media tools provide new and potentially powerful opportunities for democratic and economic development. The specific outcomes in many cases will depend on local forces shaping access to, and uses of, these social media tools.