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In response to mass protests in Zimbabwe in January 2019, the government ordered all internet service providers in the country to suspend operations. While Zimbabwe experienced its first total internet shutdown then, the government previously imposed other forms of restrictions to social network platform access, including the removal of a Facebook page of 'whistleblower' Baba Jukwa in 2014. Moreover, the government's 2018 National Policy for Information and Communication Technology initiative promised more centralized state control of the country's internet traffic. These issues and potential realities raise concerns for journalists and storytellers in Zimbabwe. How can they can circumvent censorship online? How does their use of social media complicate conceptualizations of temporality and censorship on the internet? Shortly after the shutdown ended, the Johannesburg Review of Books published a story by a journalist formatted as a Twitter timeline from his 'recollections and imaginings' of what he would have posted during the week-long social media blackout. It included descriptions of protests, statements about the state, and satire aimed at the president, telling the type of stories that the government had attempted to censor. As a vehicle for the piece, the JRB created a new Twitter account, @Zvakadhakwa, for the tweets. This paper explores notions of risk, transparency, and opacity in journalism, and storytelling under surveillance and digital censorship in Zimbabwe, by engaging with scholarship on Baba Jukwa Facebook posts before the internet shutdown in Zimbabwe and deploying a close textual analysis of the alternate Twitter timeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of information communication technologies has transformed communication in Nigeria. The mass media once regarded as the most vocal and vibrant press in Africa is losing public trust as people easily source for critical information from social media instead of the media due to their patrimonial relationship with the state. The potentials of these information communication technologies in holding government accountable and enhancing journalism practice has endangers the state. Consequently, attempts by the state at regulating social media and the mass media through draconian bills such as protection from internet falsehood and manipulation bill of 2019, and the National Communication for the prohibition of Hate Speech bill 2019. Using Habermas notion of the public sphere coupled with semi-structured interviews with 12 media practitioners, this paper examines ways in which such regulatory frameworks have impacted on both the media and democratic cultures of the Nigerian state. The paper argues that social media and its convergence in the newsroom has expounded the democratic culture due to its affordances of speedy and accountability. However, the potentials of social media and its affordance has been misused. Consequently, the contestation between the state, public and media on how social media and its convergence in the newsroom can be effectively regulated. The media and public do not trust the state as they blame the state for the rise of fake news (misinformation and disinformation). On the other hand, the state has blamed the desire for profit and commodification of news for the rise of fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a communication perspective, social movements of international significance such as the Arab Spring, Toronto G20, Spanish 15M or Occupy Wall Street have been characterized by the use of mobile communication and social media as tools for video activism and counter-surveillance against the abuse of power committed by the state forces. A representative case of this reality, which reached a high coverage and support in social media environment, can be found in the riots that took place in the Gamonal neighbourhood (Burgos, Spain) in January 2014. In this regard, this article focuses on the denunciation of police violence through video activism by Twitter users during the demonstrations across the country, applying a quantitative–qualitative mixed methodology. First, by means of a content analysis, a sample of 784 tweets linked to videos is analysed in order to identify the main topics and functions of the shared content. Second, a textual analysis of those linked videos of a violent nature recorded by witnesses in order to document police interventions is carried out. The prominent use of Twitter for distributing videos to denounce police violence stands out among the main findings, underlining the audiovisual exposure and ‘secondary visibility’ of the police officers. The results obtained also reinforce the idea of citizen empowerment through the development of an alternative form of journalism, as a practice to criticize the mainstream media coverage of the protests. Additionally, this article sheds light on the open debate about the relevance of social media to encourage citizen involvement in a face-to-face interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In striving to better understand issues associated with citizen contributions to newsmaking in crisis situations, this article identifies and elaborates four specific research problematics – bearing witness, technologies of truth-telling, mediating visualities and affectivities of othering – in order to recast more familiar modes of enquiry. Specifically, it provides an alternative heuristic to theorize the journalistic mediation of citizen imagery, and the myriad ways this process of negotiation maintains, repairs and at times disrupts the interstices of professional–amateur boundaries. Rather than centring analysis on how crisis events highlight change, it discerns the basis for a critical tracing of the material configurations and contingencies shaping journalistic imperatives towards generating visually truthful reportage. In seeking to move debates about how best to enliven digital journalism's future beyond the polarities of new media advocacy and criticism alike, we emphasize the importance of developing a collaborative, co-operative ethos of connectivity between journalists as citizens and citizens as journalists. Accordingly, each proposed problematic is examined in a manner alert to pinpointing its prospective value for theory-building, and in so doing elucidating its potential utility for scholarship in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]