The Role of Social Media in the Mobilization of Social Movement in Ethiopia
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Date
2019-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
As social media has become a ubiquitous part of our daily life, questions remained to be
answered by scholars who study social movements and new communication technologies. This
thesis explored the role of social media in the mobilizations of social movements. To achieve this
goal, the study set out to investigate the following specific objectives: explaining the factors
which increase social media usage in social movement, describing the importance of social
media in organizing social movement, describing how the content created on social media
causes social movements, understanding techniques activists use to mobilize citizens for social
movement, examining the effectiveness of social media as a tool for communication and
community mobilization and to pin point the opportunities and challenges of social media as a
social movement mobilization tool. A qualitative approach was employed to collect and analyze
the data needed to address the aforementioned objectives. Accordingly, key informant interviews
were conducted with 10 elites. Among which four were activists, two were journalists, and the
rest four were government officials and political party leaders. Content analysis and semistructured
interview were also employed for triangulation. This study was premised by the
assumption of Antonio Gramsciās theory which assumed that the mass can put revolutionary
ideology into practice generated from social elites and intellectuals, mainly through social
media. The study found that the development of social media in Ethiopia is very fast and in short
period of time it showed a lot of progress. It also uncovered regarding social media the motive of
the government is mainly collecting revenue by giving a telecom services and currently, there is
no policy framework in line with social media usage in Ethiopia. Hence, the government better
install policy framework. This study also revealed that the contents created on social media
facilitate social movements since they are emotion triggering. Finally, this study uncovered,
social movements are not created by a single cause but rather by a set of grounds that are
interrelated. From among the several factors causing social movement, the system role failure
and feeling of relative discrimination from opportunities and resources in contrast to others are
supposed as the headlines. On one hand, the system wellbeing gaps are also underlying
conditions that favor social movement by creating individual grievances.
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The Role of Social Media in the Mobilization of Social Movement in Ethiopia