This article addresses the thinking behind social media regulation in Africa and explores how it diverges from the approach in Western countries. It gives attention to the debate relating to who should be labelled as publisher on social media, an issue that has significant regulatory implications. As a result, research on social media regulation, largely based on the West, has focused on platform self-regulation or the role that states have in terms of holding platforms responsible for objectionable content. I suggest that such a focus can be problematic since it presents the Western approach as the universal case of regulation, overlooking examples in other regions like Africa. Hence, this article considers the African approach to social media regulation by reviewing the policies that have been drawn up, how social media publishers are determined, and the politics that underlie the policies. To do this, I analyse social media regulation in Africa as an alternative to the Western approach by examining policy and legislative documents in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt. The article uses the multiple stream framework of policy analysis to underscore the problem, policy and politics inherent in the regulatory trend we find in Africa. I interrogate the data using Lawrence Lessig’s (2006) work on the modalities of regulation and Philip Napoli’s (2019) concept of publishers on social media. The article shows that the trend in Africa is to classify social media users as publishers who bear the burden of liability for the content they post. I argue that this approach is preferred because of the politics at play, where the aim is not necessarily to combat online harms but to silence public criticism and dissent.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)