Social media democracy : Uganda's 2021 presidential candidates' impact using Twitter in a research case study / Ryan Gibb.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibb, Ryan (International studies professor), author.

Series:

SAGE research method cases.

SAGE research method cases

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social media--Political aspects--Uganda--Case studies.

Social media.

Internet in political campaigns--Uganda--Case studies.

Internet in political campaigns.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

London : SAGE Publications Ltd, 2024.

Summary:

Uganda's President Museveni and his party, the National Resistance Movement, continued their dominance at the polls in 2021, but a new, popular challenger known as Bobi Wine brought attention to the importance of social media as part of a national political campaign. Indeed, Wine's savvy use of Twitter and other social media propelled his message, and he gained national youth support in a country with a young median age. Years earlier, another presidential candidate, Kizza Besigye, livestreamed his detention in his home prior to the formal start of the campaign, revolutionizing the way that opposition members would publicize mistreatment by the government. Social media provide information and mobilization tools that compel the government to be responsive, whether or not social media aid in fundamentally altering the country's political makeup, as they did in the Arab Spring. There are several important contributions of this research. The research promises to advance an understanding of the use of social media in campaigns in Uganda and in Africa in general. In Uganda, social media have met with censorship like other media, and just as in other media, the government has successfully blocked both users' access and journalists' content by shutting down internet access as well as inhibiting popular use through taxation. These physical and bureaucratic hurdles illustrate the government's rightful fear of social media as a political tool for information and mobilization, and my study serves to explore how political parties used social media in the recent election. This case study analyzes tweets that Bobi Wine made during his campaign for the presidency of Uganda. After reading this case study, the reader will be more familiar with the challenges and research opportunities in conducting a social media study using text analysis and text mining. While this project involved a specific social media platform, Twitter, and a specific set of text, a politician's Twitter thread, the methods that I discuss are applicable to other media and can be used in other instances where text is available for analysis.

Notes:

Description based on XML content.

ISBN:

1-5296-8131-6

9781529681314

OCLC:

1418720506