Linking-out of a perpetual state of simulated ‘poster’ protests and virtual activism in a ‘meta-world’ of digital coloniality

Coloniality remains securely rooted in organised systems of trade, knowledge, politics, and culture. Social media is no exception. Over the past decade or so, it has undergone a viral cloning in emerging global digital economies. In Africa and other ‘post-colonial’ nations, digital coloniality appear to follow the script-book of established extractive colonial practices, where foreign interest dominates the market, sets the rules, and controls pivoting elements such as information, expertise and capital within institutional and social structures. Given this dominance, it is timely to pause and critically reflect on the positionality of social media platforms and how it curate, ?process, manipulate, extract, repackage, censor, edit and influence a vast stream of multiple-narratives to best respond to the market mandate of profit above everything else.

Extraction is the founding mandate and the golden thread that binds brick and mortar coloniality to digital coloniality. Rent seeking industries in minerals, agriculture and manufacturing, has left a long colonial trail of socio-political destruction evident in the sustained levels of growing inequality across Africa. The same capital is now firmly transitioned into the technology sector, and social media platforms are its proverbial shopfronts.

The practice of social stratification on the bases of race, class and gender identity as an instrument of historical coloniality, is not dissimilar in intent, to the?differentiating platforms digital coloniality now uses to organise multiple communities into distinct categories. On the face of it, digital community platforms appear innocuous. The drawing together of diverse people with similar interest across physical borders can only be a good thing and as the LinkedIn co-founder Red Hoffman explains “we created LinkedIn to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.” This is true as many working adults (including myself) continue to use Linkin to build networks and learn new skills.

I do however (at times) get the feeling though, that the space is over-sanitised and that the feeds I receive are carefully curated, a series of potentially ‘untrue’ moments like in the Trueman Show. Worse still, that feeds, responses and posts are carefully monitored like a “matrix” of crafted realities that manages emotive surges on key issues and lulls us into a stream of dispassionate scrolling past the posts of some or other NGO on their progress made with the SDG’s or the unfolding genocide in Gaza, for example.

Digital coloniality is less sophisticated in micro level platforms such as a community safety WhatsApp groups or closed Facebook pages. Here the use of the term “BM spotted” for example, act as a rallying cry predicated on the colonial and racialised ?stigma that “Black Men” are menacing and that an alert on the platform will mitigate any potential threat. This argument does not negate the need for community safety groups, but if we take a closer look at these exchanges, it exposes the soft underbelly of the fluid polemic of colonial – post colonial social structures. The power of social media posts is unmatched in its ability to mobilize large numbers of people into positional platforms. In a sense, this is an attractive proposition for both colonial powers and liberation movements alike.

In the crafting of the Freedom Charter during 1955, the anti-Apartheid movement dispatched 50 000 volunteers into townships and rural areas across South Africa to collect the ‘freedom demands’ of South Africans. The collection of inputs to build a shared charter that sets out the demands for freedom can be likened, in modern terms, to a post going viral.

In many respects, The Freedom Charter campaign ‘went viral’ and the Apartheid state was so fearful of the process, that it sent in the police to break-up the Kliptown gathering, ?where the Freedom Charter was compiled and adopted. This ‘breaking up’ of gatherings can be compared to the current ‘takedowns’ of large tracks of online content, the online censoring of post related to Palestine for example on Instagram, and the banning and suspension of social media accounts that challenges the colonial hegemony of the West. A recent Human Rights report showed that between October and November 2023, the agency documented over 1050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including post related to human rights abuses.

Imagine for a while, that the anti-Apartheid movement had access to social media during the Freedom Charter Campaign. I may be overreaching, but I doubt that the Apartheid state would have existed for another five decades. Though, one must acknowledge, that Apartheid was defeated without the use of social media platforms as we know it. Photojournalists like Sam Nzima, who took the now? iconic picture of an injured Hector Peterson being carried during the 1976 student uprising in Soweto, would be considered a leading ‘influencer’ of his time. If Nzima and others like Ernest Cole and Benny Gool had Instagram accounts in the 70’s and 80’s, it would have certainly shortened the life-span of Apartheid inhumanity.

Paper based A5 and A3 posters and smaller folded A4 pamphlets were a popular way of mobilizing people during Apartheid and were increasingly used to express feelings or opinions. Even within the printed poster platform, the targeting of specific groups with specific messages, was already well developed if you consider the poster produced by the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee (JODAC), which was formed as an affiliate of the UDF in 1983 and provided an opportunity for whites to join the struggle against Apartheid. See the example of their poster included. Here, the distinction between advocacy and propaganda is really a question of right vs wrong, justice vs injustice, freedom vs Apartheid.

The printed poster of the struggle years became a powerful tool of communication and a visible expression of anger against oppressive Apartheid rule, not dissimilar to the digital posts we eagerly publish on platforms such as “X,” Facebook,?and LinkedIn in response to an array of social justice issues. The latter (Linkin) of course provides for a more ‘polished discernment’ where largely middle-class professionals can soapbox to their heart’s content on conscientious issues that affect them and society within the generous longform format of 3000 digital characters. A less ‘conscientious’ platform such as ?Tik-Tok, a video based digital platform, is growing rapidly with an active monthly user base of more than 1.04 billion people.

The ownership of these digital platforms is?central in how it is positioned within global digital economies. Tik-Tok for example is now under threat as recent legislation in the form of “The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”?passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, receiving 352 votes in favour, and only 65 against. The legislation effectively bans Tik-Tok in America as a “foreign adversary” “making America great again” by shielding its 126 million American Tik-Tok users from externally produced content.

The argument to ban Tick-Tok is cleverly framed within the political and economic tensions between America and China. More to the point, the consecutive and consistent loss in market share for social media platforms such as Instagram and X coupled with Elon Musk’s intimate proximity (as the owner of the “X” platform), to colonial America, and the Republican Party in particular, is a far more plausible proposition for the banning of Tik-Tok. ?

Where similar digital platforms are embedded in the political equity and foreign policy posture of the American state, the implications are less punitive. Consider the so-called January 6, 2021, insurrection, where Donald Trump supporters extensively used social media in their plans to storm the Capital building in Washington DC. It was reported that “days before a violent mob breached the US Capitol and stormed the halls of Congress, law enforcement appeared to abandon those warning signs and ignore the mass organising on social media, where a constellation of far-right Americans announced plans to “storm the Capitol” and carry out?Donald Trump’s demands to overturn the results of the presidential election.” (UK Independent)

Beyond Facebook and Twitter now X, calls for violence was extensive in the days before the insurrection on far-right message boards like Parler and messaging app Telegram. There were?calls “to bring guns” and ?to storm the Capitol and to “kill” if they encountered resistance. Ironically, and to make the point of the vested economic interest of social media platforms, the final Congressional report on the insurrection did not include a finding on the ?use of social media platforms as an organising tool for the insurrection. The inference is glaring, do not bite the hands that feed you, a trademark of industrialised cartels.

Back home and conversely so, The South African Human Rights Commission Report (January 2024)? on the KZN unrest of July 2021, found that “social media amplified grievances, stoked fear and anger, and mobilised individuals towards disruptive actions.”

Here, a notable point is made by the Commission in that there is a destabilising dynamic between social media posts in a virtual augmented world and the lived experiences and grievances of people in the manifesting realities of long standing and growing socio-economic inequalities. Simply, social media provided the communications infrastructure to mobilize disaffected communities in a sustained campaign of unrest and looting as a show of force by Jacob Zuma. In? a sense, neither social media nor Jacob Zuma can be deemed as germinating factors, as pre-existing socio-economic inequalites provided ample legroom for unrest. The unfortunate Molotov-cocktail of social media and patriarchal “big-man” politics produced fast replicating unrest at a destructive scale, a machine gun of unrest.

During our 2024 national elections, this historical context of inequality was again tested when the Democratic Alliance produced and posted on its social media platforms a campaign advert of a burning South African flag. The former Public Protector, Professor Thuli Madonsela, who helped draft a new democratic constitution following the end of Apartheid, said on the social media platform X, that she is concerned the adverts designers may harbour “unconscious rage against our flag.” Prof Madonsela might be overly polite in her in assertion, but I suspect she is dead right. The incident sparked a social media outcry with online critics saying that the burning of the flag, which for many is a symbol of their?liberation from Apartheid, is a step too far and again reinforced the perception that white South Africans does not yet comprehend and appreciate the extent of Apartheid trauma that black South Africans continue to carry and re-experience. ??

The digital burning of the flag by the Democratic Alliance, a political party supported by the majority of white Sout Africans who continue to benefit ?from the spoils of Apartheid, can be seen as an act of digital coloniality, similar in form to acts of epistemic violence in higher education and cultural procurement of African arts in the creative sectors. ?

The DA misread the ‘social media room’ and the political space given that the flag burning occurred not long after the far-right Afrikaner extremist group, AfriForum, obtained leave to appeal the ruling of the Southern Gauteng High Court, that displaying the 1928 flag, the old South African flag, amounts to hate speech.

What this means, is that on the one end, you have a moderately conservative (sometimes liberal) white-led political party, digitally ?burning the new South African flag whilst an openly racists Afrikaner right-wing group, litigates against the banning of the old South African flag. To add insult to injury, AfriForum uses the very freedoms contained under the constitution that black South Africans died for, to protect the very symbol of oppression underwhich these black South Africans were murdered, marginalised and disenfranchised.

Correctly so, the use of similar symbols of oppression in social media such as the Swastika of the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) is currently subject to legal restrictions in a number of countries, such as Austria, Belarus, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and other countries and is prohibited for use in social media and public display.?

The digital burning of the new South African flag and the litigation to protect the old South African flag, ??must evoke similar levels of offence and trauma in black South Africans as the Swastika for Jewish people globally. We can only hope that the DA and AfriForum is ignorant and or unaware of our painful past as inferred by Archbishop Desmond Tutu when?he said, “I believe that when the Germans were asked how they could possibly have permitted Hitler and the Nazis to perpetrate the horrors of the holocaust, they replied that they did not know that those things were happening. It is possible for many South Africans and others to plead a similar ignorance about the evil consequences of Apartheid and the policies being applied against black people.”

This purported collective obliviousness of many white South Africans is quickly debunked if one reviews the thousands of social media posts daily, where many white South Africans nostalgically yearn ‘for the good old days’ and continue to post vile racist rhetoric. So, when they see their political party posting the burning of a flag ?representing a ?‘black government’ and for which black South Africans died, it exposes their sense of loss of the old order and their colonial positionality as a fragile and untenable dynamic that erodes meaningful reconciliation, never mind restitution. Social media now offers a safe and often anonymous space to gather in hate and regret, as a continuum of the ‘braai day’ narrative, where African heritage, struggles and identity takes a back seat.

As in South Africa, and elsewhere, the identity and culture of colonised and occupied nations remain under threat with social media providing successive waves of indignity. Emerging out of the ruins of Gaza, is Bisan Odwa, a journalist working in Palestine and known for her Instagram posts where she used the now famous introductory line ?“Its Bisan from Gaza, and I am still alive.” Bisan risks her life every day to report on the genocide in Gaza and despite protest from many Western base media personalities, her work was recently acknowledged when she was awarded an Emmy for her contribution to media freedom in the “Outstanding Hard News Feature Story” category. In her acceptance speech, read out at the ceremony, she said "We all know the truth, but our fear undermines our ability to say it out loud, and sometimes even drives us to hide it! But remember that a world without colonialism is a world without fear... and that truth is the only way we can be free from fear."

For progressive social movements, social media has had many successes over the past few years. The #bringbackourgirls campaign in Nigeria continue today as a social movement.The mobilisation of entire societies through social media during the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011 continue to offer hopeful avenues for the use of social media as an instrument of liberation. Conversely, in places like Sudan, internet shutdowns have been weaponized as both the warring factions continue to use shutdowns as a tool of control, further isolating and worsening the suffering of affected communities and fuelling an ongoing humanitarian crisis. These shutdowns have been strategically used to create informational blackouts, disrupt communication, and control media narratives to advance the agendas of the warring parties.

Locally, as South Africa continue to battle systemic corruption and count the devastating cost of State Capture, we must remain vigilant of mainstream media’s use of ?social media, given for example, ?the spectacular blunder of the Sunday Times on its fabricated report of a rogue unit operating in the South African Revenue Services in 2019. That article fundamentally weakened our capacity to fight corruption and set us back by many years. Similarly, ?the now fully debunked New York Times article on purported sexual violence during the October 7 attack on Isreal, shows how eager mainstream media is to act at the behest of coloniality and to distribute falsehoods far and wide through social media. ?

In their paper ?“Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement,” Jones et al, 2020; offer the following insights as to help progressive forces navigate the social media space:

“[…] it is imperative to figure out a way to maintain sensible dialogues that promote democratic principles. However, this must be done not just on Twitter or social media, but in society at large by bridging the gap between proponents and opponents of diverse political parties on certain political ideologies. [..], in order for this to succeed, individual citizens will need to confront their own confirmation biases. All parties must demonstrate a willingness to seek opinions that extend beyond their individually held beliefs and ideologies (Rothwell, 2017). One way of doing this is to conscientiously seek disconfirming information about issues and policies, to engage people in constructive dialogue, and to listen to the views of individuals a policy might affect. This is especially true when it comes to individuals who may have different opinions, cultures, and/or perspectives. Otherwise, the principle or foundation upon which democracy exists via participatory democracy or inclusive participation as it is now known may cease to exist. This appears to be the case when social media facilitation of propaganda is coined as genuine and truthful information. At the same time, what counts as news and foundations for ethics in news (due to mass media mediation) is already under siege, as traditional news media have lost the battle concerning their roles as mediators of facts and gatekeepers of truth.”

Finaly, as we continue to post here on LinkedIn, and other “meta” worlds, there is an obligation that our social media posts and protests are not a link-out from the lived experienced of the excluded and the oppressed. A critical review of our positionality in relation to what we post, remains a fundamental prerequisite if we aim to narrow the gap between social media and social change. Digital platforms such as Linkin, must be more than a space where professionals can connect in productivity, it must be a space for critical praxis in protesting inequality and to build solidarity among communities to collectively undermine digital coloniality, and coloniality in all its forms. ?

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