Social Media and African Crises: A Comparative Study of Nigeria and South Africa

This study analyses the intricate influence of social media on crisis dynamics in Africa by contrasting Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests (2020) with South Africa’s instability in July 2021. This research utilises a comparative case study and mixed-methods approach, incorporating quantitative hashtag analysis, digital penetration statistics, and qualitative content coding, to investigate how technological infrastructures, historical legacies, and socio-political contexts influence social media’s dual role in empowering marginalised voices and intensifying social fragmentation. This article theoretically integrates the networked public sphere within African hybrid media ecologies, utilising framing theory to emphasise colonial, ethnic, and economic narratives, and examines the activism-surveillance dilemma that underscores the dual emancipatory and repressive potentials of digital platforms. The findings illustrate Nigeria’s largely youth-driven, Twitter-centric movement as a paradigm of decentralised activism and global cooperation, in stark contrast to South Africa’s WhatsApp-enabled turmoil characterised by disinformation and xenophobic violence within insular networks. The results highlight that platform impacts are profoundly influenced by contextual factors, including infrastructure, governmental capability, and colonial history. The research promotes legislative measures that emphasise digital literacy, multilingual supervision, safeguarding digital rights, and governance of platforms headed by Africans. This research provides a context-sensitive, decolonial framework to elucidate social media’s paradoxical effects on democratic processes and crisis management in Africa.