Social Media in Exile: Disruptors and Challengers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan

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A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Abraham Tesfalul Zere

December 2020

Social Media in Exile: Disruptors and Challengers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan

ABRAHAM TESFALUL ZERE

has been approved for

the School of Media Arts & Studies

and the Scripps College of Communication by

Steve Howard

Professor of Media arts & Studies

Scott Titsworth

Dean, Scripps College of Communication

ii Abstract

ZERE, ABRAHAM TESFALUL, Ph.D., December 2020, Media Arts & Studies

Social Media in Exile: Disruptors and Challengers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan

Director of Dissertation: Steve Howard

This dissertation, drawing on fieldwork interviews with 29 leading activists from three countries and examining popular social media platforms through Critical Discourse

Analysis (CDA), studies how social media tools have been used to challenge the repressive political leadership of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The ruling elites of these three countries –mismanaging the scant resources in each, and dealing with large populations of young people with few prospects – faced daunting new challenges.

Advancement in communication technologies and the emergence of social media revitalized the despairing youth to take matters into their own hands. They challenged their repressive rulers through decentralized and nonviolent modes of struggle that successfully fused the diaspora communities.

The dissertation borrows theoretical underpinnings from Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere theory, and Michel Foucault’s concept of speaking truth to power. It benefits from

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2012)’s framing of social media sites as disruptors of the existing status quo. The findings illustrate that social media platforms have enabled youth to challenge the information monopoly imposed by their governments. These platforms have allowed for horizontal communications and added a new layer of democratization to the decision-making process, as opposed to the traditional strict top-

iii down approach. The findings outline the wider availability of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging have helped average citizens articulate their views, erode the personality cults that surrounded stalwart rulers, and engage the huge diaspora community of each country to step in. Activists have utilized social media in three interconnected ways: creating platforms to discuss and strategize outside the influence of the state; easily bypassing the state security’s repeated infiltrations; and then finally, as in Ethiopia and Sudan, giving them the confidence to take proactive steps and occupy the streets. I conclude while Eritrean activists have challenged the state hegemony both in Sudan and Ethiopia, freer expression did not translate into meaningful political change due to severe economic conditions and deferred expectations.

iv Dedication

To the brave men and women from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan who have faced and challenged their fascist states’ security systems’ live ammunition with their bare chests.

They may have been shot, but their spirits never died and they continue to haunt the

executioners. A luta continua.

v Acknowledgments

This work is the outcome of a long process not only of data collection and research, but of sacrifices by the people who selflessly gave their lives for the betterment of others. I owe special gratitude to everyone who has been part of the struggle for justice in the three studied countries.

Then comes the academic guidance and mentoring. I have benefited a lot from

Professor Steve Howard, starting with the many course seminars at the start of my M.A. studies. His quick feedback and acute observation in encouraging the exploration of possible angles during the writing process was incredibly helpful. Dr. Wolfgang Suetzl guided me at a very crucial stage of my dissertation, formulating a theoretical framework and writing literature review. I owe Professor Devika Chawla a special appreciation for her important guidance at the proposal stage and the two crucial course seminars I attended with her on postcolonialism and ethnography. Professor Ghirmai Negash immensely shaped my academic career beginning with my undergraduate studies at the

University of Asmara. I remain eternally grateful for his guidance and friendship.

My heartfelt appreciation goes to the research subjects who consistently slotted time to provide me insightful interviews and then address my follow-up questions despite their tight schedules. Zecharias Zelalem and Husam Osman Mahjoub were more than generous in providing me materials and answering all questions about Ethiopia and

Sudan, respectively.

vi I was fortunate to have a family who persistently encouraged me to pursue my dreams. I hope to pay them back following my long digression in graduate studies.

vii Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... iii

Dedication ...... v

Acknowledgments...... vi

Chapter 1: Rationale, Media History, and Literature Review ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1

Rationale of the Study ...... 4

Selection of Three African Countries ...... 9

Social Media in the Three Selected Countries ...... 12

Selection of Social Media Sites ...... 15

History and the State of the Media in the Three Countries...... 18

History and the State of the Media in Eritrea ...... 18

History and the State of the Media in Ethiopia ...... 21

History and the State of the Media in Sudan ...... 26

Overview of Literature on Social Media in the Three Countries...... 32

Literature Review: Social Media Driven Uprisings in MENA ...... 34

Conditions that Led to Popular Uprisings ...... 36

Convergences of Alternative and Traditional Media in MENA Uprisings ...... 40

Can MENA Popular Uprisings be Replicated in the Selected Countries? ...... 44

Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework and Methodology ...... 46

Diaspora Community and the Political Influence at Homelands ...... 46

viii

Nonviolent Resistance ...... 49

Theoretical Frame in Analyzing the Social Media Driven Resistances ...... 53

Applying the Public Sphere Theory ...... 54

Applying Speaking Truth to Power ...... 60

Social Media Sites as Disruptors ...... 64

The Intersection of the Three Theories ...... 66

Methodology ...... 69

Research Questions ...... 69

Reflexivity...... 70

Data Gathering Process ...... 71

Selection of Participants ...... 75

Analyzing Through the Lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ...... 79

Ethical Considerations During Data Collection, Processing, and Analysis ...... 80

Political Developments on Each Country During Data Collection ...... 83

Challenges During Research and How I Overcame them ...... 86

Chapter 3: Findings and Discussions ...... 89

Eritrean Exiled Social Media Challenges the State Hegemony ...... 89

Eritrea: The State, Transnational Identity, and Dual Roles ...... 90

Paltalk: From a Dating App to a Tool of Political Mobilization ...... 97

The Influence of Middle East and North African Popular Uprisings ...... 102

Eritrean Social Media as Public Sphere ...... 105

Social Media without Internet: Reaching out Eritreans Inside the Country ...... 110

Mechanisms of Challenging the State Propaganda and Information Control...... 116

Semi-open Source for Information Gathering ...... 117

Using Personal Narratives to Fill the Information Gap ...... 119

Satirizing Power to Deconstruct the Perceived Images of the State Officials .... 121

Social Media Set to Upend Information Monopoly and Document Alleged Crimes 126

#Yiakl: From Social Media Campaign to Grassroots Movement ...... 134

Shaping the Music Production; Disarming the State Propaganda ...... 149

Chapter 4: Ethiopian Social Media Activists in Challenging One-party Rule ...... 156

EPRDF’s Promising Start but Swift Shift ...... 156

Bloggers Say “We Blog, because We Care”; the Government Disagrees ...... 158

Coordinators Abroad Demonstrators at Home: The Use of Social Media in #OromoProtests...... 163

Government Responds: “Hack, Restrict, and Imprison” ...... 168

Paid Lobbyists to Sway International Opinion ...... 170

Hacking and Targeting Activists in Exile ...... 172

Activists Double Down their Attacks ...... 176

Information Slowed, but not Stopped ...... 180

Qeerroos’ Victory; Quick Clampdown ...... 183

First Casualty of Social Media in Post-reform ...... 185

Multiple Interest Groups Competing for Scant Resources and Deferred Promises.. 188

Social Media’s “Exact Reverse” Roles in Post-change ...... 191

Chapter 5: The Use of Sudanese Social Media in Helping to Unseat 30-year-old Regime ...... 196

Exiled but Always Tied to Sudan ...... 196

The Long Struggle of Sudanese Diaspora in Challenging Bashir’s Regime ...... 202

Social Crises as Precursors for Political Mobilization ...... 206

The Revolution won’t be Televised, but Live-streamed and Live-tweeted ...... 210

All Eyes on Sudan, all Roads to Khartoum ...... 216

Communication During the Internet Blackout and June Massacre ...... 222

#TasgutBas, #BlueForSudan, and other Social Media Campaigns ...... 226

The Electronic Jihad in Casting Doubts and Spreading Misinformation ...... 231

Demonstrators Insist: “It isn’t Arab Spring” ...... 235

Chapter 6: Conclusion...... 238

Difficulties Ahead ...... 246

References ...... 249

Appendix ...... 287

Chapter 1: Rationale, Media History, and Literature Review

Introduction

The dissertation examines the role of exiled social media activists in disrupting and challenging the repressive regimes in three countries of the Horn of Africa: Eritrea,

Ethiopia, and Sudan. “Disrupting” and “challenging” are two key concepts used and hence they need to be defined as to how I used them. As discussed in the subsequent sections of the dissertation, the three countries have been known for their repressive media environment and stern political leaderships that do not entertain opposing views.

Mainstream media in each country have been banned; editors either ended up in prisons on trumped up charged or the few lucky ones had fled their countries. The absence of political parties, unconducive environment for civic society and NGOs to operate in the countries, and overall lack of independent media have created a situation where each government established an absolute monopoly to formulate their narratives. Such position has enabled for the states to commit abuses unaccounted as there is no one to check or report. Social media emerged as the most viable options to dispute the truth or the validity of the claims fed by each state. They introduced a notion of accountability from far and denied the state authorities to continue their oppressions unchecked. Therefore,

“challenge” in the dissertation indicates the roles social media assumed as an offshore opposition, civic society or independent media to hold the power on check.

“Disruptors,” is the second key concept of the dissertation. The concept has been borrowed from Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri (2012) positioning of social media sites as alternative tools situated to alter or disturb the one-way flow of information. The extensive control of thinking and communication spaces have enabled the governments

of the three countries to narrate their stories unhampered. Social media activists of the three countries have been enabled to disrupt the linear narratives that have been fed for long. Therefore, by “disruptors and challengers” in the dissertation imply the two-way process of unsettling and then going further to hold the elites in power accountable.

Overall, the new trend shakes the status-quo the governments had long enjoyed.

The dissertation starts with a rationale to show how the three countries have deviated from the international and regional charters they had signed. It identifies the paradoxes between the treaties the selected countries signed or perhaps stipulated in their national constitutions and the actual practices on the ground. Then I proceed to justify my selection of the three countries and the social media sites that I studied.

I ventured to study the role of social media in challenging state repression largely because traditional media in each country had reached the limits of their effectiveness due to frail infrastructures and deterring state systems. Hence, I devote long sections on each state’s media history and the current landscape of each to show why diaspora social media became the last resort.

A big body of literature has studied the role of decentralized social media in challenging autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The so- called Arab Spring is discussed as literature review as the dissertation takes the MENA popular uprising as an important model. While the Arab Spring encouraged the youth of the three selected countries to take similar initiative, it conversely prepared the

governments and security apparatuses of those three countries to take precautions against such uprisings.

The second chapter is devoted to the theoretical framework of my study and its methodology. I have used three theoretical foundations: the public sphere theory, speaking truth to power, and social media as disruptors of the existing status quo. As detailed in the sections, I borrowed certain positions from each theory as I could not frame the entire study under the rubric of a single theory. I devoted long sections to justify how I incorporated the theoretical underpinning from each, as some of them diametrically oppose the other theory’s (or theories’) core foundations. I applied a mixed qualitative approach of in-depth interviews with leading social media activists and study of the popular social media sites through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Selection of my research subjects is discussed in addition to each state’s political developments during the data collection process.

The subsequent chapters are devoted to my findings and discussions. Exiled activists, in collaboration with dissidents inside the countries, have pressured each regime to loosen its tight grip. My findings and discussion chapters have examined thematically how social media have been instrumental in either pressuring or challenging each regime.

As discussed in the finding chapters, parallels exist in the mechanisms each regime used to suppress dissident voices. Although the socio-economic conditions of the three countries might not significantly differ, the differences in each state did serve as both liabilities and assets for activists. My findings and discussions addressed the steps taken

by each state to contain information and look at how social media activists overcame the state imposition using various mechanisms.

The concluding chapter draws parallels and identifies slight differences between how each state sought to curb the growing online opposition vis-à-vis activists in the countries. By drawing similarities, it sheds light on the precarious policies taken by each state to quell dissidents. The dissertation wraps up with the new post-change encounters that the countries, mainly Ethiopia and Sudan, are facing. The growing worries similarly deal with new difficulties driven by social media resulting from the power vacuum and resulting discontent as most of the desired political changes failed to transpire into anything permanent.

Rationale of the Study

Before delving into each country’s media system, it is imperative that I start with basic concepts of freedom of expression. This would serve as a steppingstone where the three countries fail to meet the minimum expectations to safeguard the fundamental rights in their territories. Freedom of expression is considered an essential right of free citizens no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Article 19 of the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”

(UN, 2015, p. 40). Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are required

to abide by the declaration. Member states are expected to state in their constitutions and laws that free expression is safeguarded in their sovereign territories.

The dissertation deals with freedom of expression in three African countries:

Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. Three of them are members of United Nations (UN) and

African Union (AU) and therefore signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Article 9 of African

Charter on Human and People’s Rights, adopted in 1981, stipulates that “every individual shall have the right to receive information” and “disseminate his (sic) opinion within the law” (p.4).

As signatories of the two central charters, the countries have vowed in their national constitutions a commitment to respect the right to receive and disseminate information freely. Article 39 of the Sudanese constitution states, “Every citizen shall have an unrestricted right to the freedom of expression, reception of information, publication, and access to the press without prejudice to order, safety, or public morals as determined by law” (p. 20).

Similarly, article 29 of the 1995 constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, hereby abbreviated as Ethiopia, states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice” (p. N/A).

Of the three countries of this research, Eritrea alone has no constitution. As a member of the U.N. and signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and

African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, however, it is obliged to respect the treaties. Despite their signing these universal treaties and regional charters, Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia (until the changes in the two countries) had routinely forbidden their citizens from freely accessing information. They enforce draconian laws to keep journalists from reporting independently. When citizens are legally denied the basic rights to access, share, and express their opinions in an unrestricted way, they opt for other channels. They find ways around the barriers erected by the state. Social media has provided the main path for bypassing information restrictions.

Recent events across Africa strongly suggest that social media is playing a vital role in challenging the status quo of long-standing regimes. For years, through state- controlled media and/or repression of independent media, certain governments have succeeded in shaping their narratives. That helped these repressive governments cling to power as they effectively isolated their citizens from the international community. The lack of independent media further kept citizens from communicating horizontally, which in turn helped the autocratic regimes continue their reign unimpeded.

This dissertation studies the cases of three of Africa’s most media-repressive countries in recent years: Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. As the subsequent sections show, the countries regularly languish in the bottom ranks of the annual Press Freedom

Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. The Committee to Protect Journalists

(CPJ), an international organization that defends the right of journalists, repeatedly has expressed concerns about the stifling media atmosphere in those three countries, before the recent changes in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Until the political change of leadership in Ethiopia with the arrival of Prime

Minister Abiy Ahmed in April 2018 and ousting of Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir in

April 2019, the countries were widely accused of gross human rights abuses and lack of freedom of expression. Rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty

International, and the U.N. Security Council have repeatedly expressed their concerns over the three countries. Although the tendency has continued in Ethiopia after some promising signs, the post-Abiy Ahmed developments would be beyond the scope of the dissertation. The media history section of the dissertation will tackle the all- encompassing gross human rights abuses and their manifestation in these countries’ media-sphere.

All three governments controlled the news media and silenced independent voices as key tactics in their consolidation of power. Despite all the challenges, however, social media has been spearheading the waves of change. Ethiopia first saw how social media driven communication can pressure autocratic governments to loosen their grip on power and open up. As Al Jazeera TV (2018a) in their “Listening Post” – a weekly program dedicated to the state of media – described, social media has shaped calls for political change in Ethiopia. “You cannot imagine this revolution, this change without social media," (para. 11) declared Jawar Mohammed, Ethiopia’s most prominent social media

activist who has been a central figure in the ongoing demand for change. Mohammed, who has been labeled “terrorist” by the previous Ethiopian government, has returned to his home country after living in exile for 15 years. Another prominent Ethiopian blogger,

Eskinder Nega, who was released after six years of imprisonment, similarly warned, “If

Abiy Ahmed does not deliver the promise of democracy, then we'll be back to social media," (Al Jazeera, 2018a, para 17th).

While repressive regimes have sought to hamper the emerging social media trend, they have found it difficult and costly to exert full control they have had with traditional media. In an increasingly intertwined and interdependent world, the autocratic leaders are finding it more difficult to justify their suppression of information.

The dissertation studies the use of social media in challenging the three governments. I will first discuss the justifications for selecting the three countries and the social media sites I studied. Then I will cover the media history and systems for each country. Before proceeding to the emerging alternative media, in order to show how that has been difficult to operate, I will discuss the traditional media in each country.

Very little research has been conducted on how social media has been facilitating the ongoing demand for change in the three countries. This is attributed to the lack of information and access to three countries, mainly before the recent change in Sudan and

Ethiopia. This in turn discouraged independent researchers from pursuing such subjects.

As an extension of their media control mechanisms, internet penetration was very low, which is still true in Eritrea. Yet, as I argue in the later sections, the lack of wider internet

penetration does not necessarily mean social media platforms have been ineffective.

Horizontal channels of communication combined with citizens’ growing appetite to access decentralized information – often as an expression of defiance against state imposition – make social media’s outreach and influence far greater than internet penetration rate indicates.

Social media has abolished the geographical gap, helping to embrace the influential diasporas in the struggle for change. The diaspora community of each country serve as point of contacts between their home and host countries. Their role is vital both in material assistance to their compatriots inside the country and amplifying the demand for change.

The dissertation takes the social media-driven Middle East and North Africa

(MENA) region, commonly referred as an Arab Spring, as a point of departure for further studies of new frontiers. As the literature review section shows, the MENA region and the three countries of my dissertation share many similarities in both their media and political repression. Yet, other factors also play a distinguishing role between these countries, including access, each state’s response to the growing dissidence, and their state security’s awareness to counter such trends.

Selection of Three African Countries

The three countries of the Horn of Africa have been known for their repressive leadership and tattered media-scape. Journalists routinely faced censorship, harassment, and arbitrary arrest that compel many to flee their country for safety. The media

repression experienced in these countries is an extension of their political suppression.

The political climate of the countries has played a major role cultivating the restrictive media environment that’s been in place for decades.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan took power through a military coup in 1989. He was ousted in April 2019 with popular demand with the help of military intervention.

Eritrea has only seen one president since its independence in 1993: Isaias Afwerki, who led the struggle for independence. A similar situation could be seen in Ethiopia whose

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi led the country since 1991, though he died in 2012. The ruling party, EPRDF, dominated by a minority group in Ethiopia, won 100 percent of the seats in the 2015 elections. Hailemariam Desalegn, who assumed the role of prime minister after Zenawi’s death, could not handle the country’s growing political crisis and the mounting pressure for change. As a result, he resigned from his post and the ruling party’s chair in February 2018. The media landscape has changed substantially since then. Just as Ethiopia suffered from an extremely repressive media, with bans on social media and the internet at large after every major shakeup, political changes under Prime

Minister Abiy Ahmed have helped elevate the influence and potential of social media.

Abiy Ahmed’s promising media changes have allowed many exiled journalists and prominent social media activists to return from exile. The loosening on media restrictions has permitted many formerly banned media outlets to operate from inside

Ethiopia. Yet, as discussed in the findings, Ethiopia is still at crossroads. It did not take long to relapse into the old style of administration that has been known for its stifling

media environment, torture, displacement and imprisonment of dissidents and media professionals.

Each country’s political suppression and the overstay in power by its political leadership are linked to each country’s repressive media policies. Eritrea was labeled the most “censored” country in the 2015 and 2019 surveys by the Committee to Protect

Journalists, while Ethiopia was placed fourth in the same survey (CPJ, 2015a; CPJ,

2019). In annual reports of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), all three countries have bad reputation and poor records.

As my subsequent sections elaborate, there were many similarities in the style of repression between the three countries. Social media has emerged as a new challenge to the repressive countries’ consolidated status-quo. Hence, my dissertation deals with how activists have been using social media to exert pressure on their respective governments vis-à-vis how each regime tries to quell the growing social media-driven resistance.

The frequently exercised mechanisms include total internet ban and state of emergency declarations in order to clamp down on dissident voices, as seen in Ethiopia and the Sudan. Eritrea employs extensive retributive measures as a way of silencing internal dissidence. My dissertation compares and examines the differences and similarities of the three countries. In the discussion sections, I dealt with how social media has created an opportunity to challenge the status-quo. The findings similarly shed light if such changes would have positive influence on the political landscape of each country.

My involvement and background contributed to my dissertation topic. An Eritrean citizen who’s involved in media, I was founding executive director of PEN Eritrea in exile, one center of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers and journalists that defends freedom of expression and promotes literature. While my nationality provided me the opportunity to follow things closely and privileged me with nuances and conversations in local languages in the context of Eritrea, the geographical proximity of

Sudan and Ethiopia is another advantage. In addition to my cultural familiarity with the two countries, my ability to communicate in Tigrinya and Amharic, the working languages of the Eritrea and Ethiopia respectively, helped me tap information more easily.

Social Media in the Three Selected Countries

I wanted to study the possible roles social media in the facilitating changes in the selected countries because the traditional media of each country already have been studied by various scholars. As the history and structure of the traditional media in my chosen three countries – both private and state – show up in subsequent sections, in many ways these areas have reached a point of saturation. Due to lack of progress and calcification in these traditional media systems, many scholars apparently have lost interest in studying them.

Each political leader/party has overstayed their time in power by crushing dissident voices and controlling the traditional media in order to shape their narratives.

The nature, structures, and ownership of media in each country reflect the difficulty of

traditional media in securing lasting changes or pressuring their governments to loosen their strong grip on power.

Since late-2010, social media has been hailed as the main enabler of challenging autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. This has delivered a strong signal in the most repressive countries, creating both challenges and opportunities. Increasingly, citizens who are tired of the old rule are weighing the possibilities if newer media avenues can help them articulate their demands. Similarly, the governments, who have long controlled their traditional media, are responding anxiously to the emerging media as it operates largely outside of their control. Governments are introducing severe and swift laws to control the increasing online challenges. During times of mounting pressures, as observed in Ethiopia and Sudan they declare the state of emergency and ban internet and social media. In Eritrea, extreme policing and harsh measures are used to repress social media in order to send a strong signal (BBC, 2017a; Boswell, 2011; Foltyn,

2017).

These governments and their shareholders limit access and centralize internet service providers as a means of control. Independent companies allowed to operate in those countries, in order to avoid endangering their interests and terminating their contacts, prefer to compromise and even collaborate with the state. This enables state authorities to ban “disfavored” content and allows them to target certain individuals for surveillance.

The influence of social media easily transcends the geographical boundaries of these countries, which adds important dimension to the media discussion. As each country strives for total control inside its territories, social media has helped reignite the conversation about each country, engaging the diaspora community as prime movers of change. As the findings demonstrate, it is mainly through the help of the diaspora community of each country that such challenges of authority are becoming plausible.

Asked by Al Jazeera English about the ongoing protests in Ethiopia, the country’s then minister of Communication Affairs, Mr. Getachew Reda said, “What we have here is an attempt by some rejectionist elements from the diaspora to organize through social media and all violent demonstrations which are basically aimed at dismantling state structure and create instability that would help them drive their own agendas” (Workneh,

2016). Reda’s response reflects the new frontier each state has been confronted with during the ongoing demand for change.

By trespassing the geographical boundaries, social media has posed another challenge to the repressive regimes as it successfully incorporated the diaspora community. This further opened the possibilities between online and offline activism. As the conversation about the traditional media in the selected countries seems exhausted, my dissertation takes the conversation further. Different reports and news articles by rights groups and media outlets have been compiled about each country. My dissertation fuses the disconnected reports in order to show a bigger picture the role of social media in facilitating changes.

Selection of Social Media Sites

Social media is such a broad topic and I can’t attempt to study the effect of each platform in my dissertation. After conducting preliminary exploration of the use, popularity, and availability in the three countries, particularly with their potential in challenging the political leadership, I limited my research to three social media platforms:

Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Due to its accessibility Facebook is widely used in most developing countries.

Paltalk has been very popular among the diaspora communities of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and

Somalia. Paltalk is easily accessible mainly because it combines audio, text, and video features. This medium becomes naturally convenient for those with slightly lower literacy levels. However, the efficacy of Paltalk is mainly limited to the diaspora community.

With the type of connections and common use of internet in public places, it’s difficult for nationals inside the country to freely participate in such discussions.

Facebook, however, has been one of the most effective ways of connecting the diaspora with citizens inside Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. Due to the nature of the growing immigrant communities of each country who are actively engaged in their country’s respective political discussions, Facebook has been used both as means of disseminating information and staying in touch.

The common use of Facebook as the most convenient site for such activism can be readily observed by considering the activists who have taking lead roles. The

Minneapolis-based executive director of Oromia Media Network, Jawar Mohammed,

demonstrates the popularity of Facebook in this context. Mohammed was very active and vocal on the Oromo protests in Ethiopia that spearheaded political change. Followers from inside Ethiopia treated Mohammed as independent media by recording and sending him footage and crucial information on real-time from the ground. Then he processed the information before disseminating it. He has more than 1.9 million followers on Facebook as of June 2020.

A Facebook page called Sactism used to publish classified documents of the

Eritrean government, highlighting the gross abuses committed at the hands of the state authorities. Although the page mainly published in Tigrinya, Eritrea’s lingua-franca, sometimes it garnered around half a million weekly hits. Although the traffic to such sites mainly comes from the diaspora, due to slow internet connection inside Eritrea (as most contents of the page were broadcast through opposition radios that reach Eritreans inside the country), the effect and outreach were much wider than indicated by the number of hits.

During the Middle East popular uprising, Sudanese cybersecurity paid extra attention to Facebook as it remained one of the most popular sites. Although the government managed to suppress the initial attempts made by some to organize public demonstration through Facebook, (Boswell, 2011), similar efforts such as “stay at home” protests were organized through social media (Foltyn, 2017). Similarly, during the

December 2018 uprising that culminated into overthrowing Bashir’s regime, the then

Sudanese government repeatedly banned Facebook (Reporters Without Borders, 2019).

WhatsApp has been popular medium for organizing protests in Sudan in addition to

Facebook (Sudan Tribune, 2014). As I can’t access WhatsApp communications in groups, however, it’s been difficult to use for such studies. During my field research and interviews with the activists, I have learned how WhatsApp has been effective in information sharing during the uprising.

Twitter was another medium my study covered. Due to the socio-economic status of each country, and considering Twitter’s limitations, the site has little utility for activists in their home countries. Yet, as most media discussions and important information exchanges take place on Twitter, most of the elites who were actively shaping discourse were very active on Twitter. Activists use Twitter to stay in touch with the international community, particularly human rights organizations, and international media.

The unfavorable environments inside the countries do not allow independent media to flourish. As a substitute for such media, bloggers have been very influential, particularly in Ethiopia, and the Sudan. Until they were later targeted by state security, a collective called “Zone 9” operated in Ethiopia. Similarly, blogs have been influential and at the same time drawn unwelcome attention from the state securities of their respective countries as they mostly operate from the diaspora. My research covers blogging as another influential social media alternative that has been playing a key role in challenging autocratic regimes.

History and the State of the Media in the Three Countries

Before proceeding to the next level, it is necessary to devote adequate space to the history, structure, and ownership of media in each country. It helps in understanding how the current state might have been enabled by a frail media foundation. This in turn would serve as a point of departure to discuss why social media remains the only option to challenge such state repression.

History and the State of the Media in Eritrea

Although print media and publishing have a long history in Eritrea that date back to the British colonial period (1942-1952), privately owned independent newspapers only flourished after the country’s independence. From the first independent newspaper, Setit, that was launched in August 1997, until the final ban of all private media on Sept. 18,

2001, Eritreans witnessed a vibrant but short-lived press era. As the former editor of the first independent newspaper, exiled journalist Aaron Berhane writes that at one point 18 private newspapers operated in the country (Berhane, 2016).

Following the ban of seven independent newspapers and the subsequent arrests of their editors, Eritrean journalism entered a long, dark history. According to the official records of Committee to Protect Journalists (2020), 16 independent journalists have never been brought into an independent court, of which 12 have been taken into custody in

September 2001. They have had no contacts with their families, and their whereabouts remains unknown. The Eritrean government has ignored repeated calls by the international community to clarify their fates.

The September 2001 crackdown opened a dark phase in the political and cultural scene of the country. The national assembly was suspended, and the state media filled the vacuum by disseminating robust propaganda. Under President Isaias Afwerki, who has ruled the country since its independence in 1993, and the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) party, civil society organizations and NGOs are banned, international media correspondents are not allowed access, and other political parties are barred

(Tronvoll, 2009; Gagliardone & Stremlau, 2011).

Since the ban of private media, Eritrea has excavated new depths in the context of

Africa. Gagliardone & Stremlau describe the atmosphere: “It is the only country on the continent with no private media outlets, and the state-owned media are vehicles for aggressive propaganda celebrating the country’s fighters and the government’s political project, which is based on self-sufficiency and resistance to external influences” (2011, p.

11).

On top of the media and private newspapers ban, Eritrea’s ministry of information introduced a pervasive censorship. According to the ministry of information’s directives, all works to be distributed, printed, and recorded in the country must get prior approval from the ministry. The lack of clear directives combined with long waiting periods – where one film might take about a year trudging through the censorship process – has crippled Eritrean art production. Most talented writers, journalists, and artists were forced to either hibernate or flee the country (Tronvoll & Mekonnen, 2014).

Nor were journalists who work for Eritrea’s state media spared of the routine harassment, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation (CPJ, 2006). Another major media crackdown took place in February 2009. Journalists and staff members of the educational

Radio Bana, sponsored by the country’s ministry of education, were rounded up by military and taken to the infamous military prison center near the capital. A majority of the 29 staff and journalists of the educational radio station were released after four years, without any charges. The remaining six were released after six years (PEN International,

2015).

Eritrea has held a spot among the worst in rankings that document press freedom.

In its 2015 and 2019 surveys, CPJ named Eritrea the most censored country in the world, followed by North Korea. Similarly, the county came in last, 180 among 180, in the annual Press Freedom Index compiled by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF). After

Eritrea secured the last place for 10 consecutive years, only after 2018 has been its place taken over by North Korea and Turkmenistan. RSF explains: “Eritrea relinquished the bottom place to North Korea” but that does not mean there has been “fundamental change in the situation in this aging dictatorship where freely reported news and information have long been banned.” In its 2017 report, RSF stated, “Like everything else in Eritrea, the media are totally subject to the whim of President Issayas Afeworki, a predator of press freedom who is responsible for ‘crimes against humanity,’ according to a June 2016

UN report” (Reporters Without Borders, 2018; Reporters Without Borders, 2017).

As the CPJ (2015) report states, many capable Eritrean journalists were forced into exile. Many of these exiled journalists open online or radio broadcasts directed at

Eritreans inside the country. The level of outreach is limited due to weak signals and jamming. This is further complicated by the fact that the state owns and controls the only internet service provider in the country. Despite the slow connections and limited outreach, the government does not attempt to block certain websites or target social media as aggressively as it has gone after traditional media. As Victoria Bernal argues, the Eritrean state rather employs a different mechanism: “Its strategy appears to be one of attempted media saturation of Eritrea’s population with pro-government propaganda using conventional media platforms of television, radio, and newspapers that reach wider audiences within Eritrea than does the Internet (2013, p. 249).

As the Eritrean government has total control of the media inside the country, the only available alternative voice comes from diaspora-based opposition websites and radio stations. While satellite dishes, increasing in use, do serve as an alternative to the monotonous state propaganda, they mostly satisfy the public demand for entertainment since few international media show any interest in covering or discussing Eritrean issues.

Although they will be discussed broadly in the findings chapter, Eritrean owned TV stations started to broadcast to Eritrea since the end of 2018.

History and the State of the Media in Ethiopia

Although Ethiopia boasts a long history of literature, the country was very late in opening to private media. In modern times, Ethiopia was first led by a monarchy in the

form of Emperor Haile Selassie. During Haile Selassie’s time and after he was overthrown in 1974 by a military coup, the Derg, private media had little space to operate. As the country was waging war on different fronts, the state-controlled media and literature were tainted with propaganda. Hence, the year 1991, when the Ethiopian

People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition led by TPLF took power, can be considered the beginning of free media in Ethiopia. Though the new coalition allowed independent media to flourish, as Gagliardone & Stremlau (2011) state, their media philosophy was “shaped by the ideology of revolutionary democracy, a Leninist approach that emphasizes the role of a politically astute and dominant party directing policies from the center but with some limited consultation with the masses” (p. 8).

In Stremlau’s (2011) argument, when EPRDF took power in 1991, it relaxed the tight media environment. After the declaration of a press law, as the article documents, between 1992 and 1997 more than 200 newspapers and 87 magazines started publication inside the country. The state allowed independent media to thrive, while attempting to compete with them as it had obvious advantages. However, the state media were particularly poor in quality as they primarily had political objectives. As the main content of the government media focused on development projects run by government, it became dull and unappealing (p. 721).

Stremlau (2011) writes that while the state media was known for its dull content, the majority of independent publications were highly critical of the EPRDF’s ethnic federalism policy, and eventually the ruling party said enough is enough: “Responding to

this criticism, the EPRDF sought to control the press through arresting journalists and using the state media for propaganda. In the long term, this contradictory strategy failed to facilitate the development of a media system that could contribute to genuine democratic governance” (p. 716).

The May 2005 election proved a turning point for Ethiopia’s media. Although the

EPRDF party initially had granted extensive freedom to campaign, it came to an end when the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) started to gain more support than expected. A violent conflict that took the lives of more 200 people followed. According to Stremlau (2011): “Fifteen journalists were among the more than 100 opposition party leaders and civil society leaders that were arrested and placed on trial. The journalists were primarily charged with crimes of ‘treason’ or as ‘conspirators’ of the opposition who were accused of ‘attempted genocide,’ ‘armed rebellion,’ and ‘outrage against the constitution’’ (p. 717).

After the violent incident in 2005, most of the editors of the critical newspapers either were arrested or fled the country; that immediately changed the conversation for those who stayed behind. They did not want to risk their lives and not surprisingly were reluctant to challenge the government. Some journalists who did seek to revive their publications were denied license (Stremlau, 2011, p. 717).

Following the 2005 election and its aftermath, Ethiopia continued to enact laws restricting media freedom. Several laws were passed to limit citizens from accessing and sharing information that the country’s constitution had allowed (Lemke & Chala, 2016;

Dugo & Eisen, 2016). As Lemke & Chala (2016) argue, the most restrictive law silencing

Ethiopian journalists was the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation passed in 2009. The law

“authorized the government’s interception of communication. Several journalists, bloggers, and democracy activists have been charged and sentenced under this law. In

July 2014, seven members of the famous Ethiopian blog, Zone 9, along with three journalists, were charged with terrorism for using encryption tools for securing their online communications” (p. 172). The anti-terror law forced many Ethiopian journalists to flee the country and swept many others into custody. On top of that, the government passed another law, Charities and Societies, in order to smother these who were not sufficiently silenced by the anti-terror law. As Dugo & Eisen (2016) elaborate, the

Charities and Societies law restricts access to areas most affected by the popular uprising and natural disasters such as famine. The authors state, “The CSP’s impact ranges from decimating domestic human rights NGOs by limiting their foreign funding and by coercing them into changing their core activities into non-human rights areas” (2016, p.

347). As a result, some prominent journalists who had continued to work against the repressive environment went to jail, while others were exiled or otherwise silenced.

Ethiopian government used different overt and covert techniques to silence journalists and stifle independent voices. Some of the widely known techniques included intimidation, jailing journalists and bloggers, intimidating vocal artists and using bogus pretexts to keep them in custody, and jamming and blocking diaspora-based satellite television stations and websites. As researchers of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty

International noted, the Ethiopian state also banned them from access and cast researchers as spies who intended to overthrow the government. The mechanisms of silencing were not limited to journalists. When the state launched coercive measures and targeted certain areas during times of unrest, it destroyed cell-phone towers and confiscated mobile phones, in order to cut communication and disrupt the exchange of news via iPhones and similar communication devices. This allowed the state to hamper efforts among critics and opposition to use cellular communication to organize and intensify riots and protests (Dugo & Eisen, 2016, p. 347).

The harassment and silencing of journalists, however, was not limited to

Ethiopia’s territories. With the diaspora-based critical journalists not sufficiently silenced, Dugo & Eisen (2016) wrote that the Ethiopian security tactics extended to installing malware/spyware onto the computers of Ethiopian journalists in the United

States. Although such acts of espionage outside the state’s jurisdiction are illegal, evidence strongly suggests it happened anyway (p. 348).

Using different pretexts, Ethiopia silenced critical journalists and sent them into extended hibernation. For nationals who wanted to access information from outside the country, this was very difficult because of the internet monopoly and its low penetration

(0.75 percent of the population in 2010). Critical websites run by exiled journalists were blocked and hacked (Gagliardone & Stremlau, 2011, p. 13).

Between November 2015 and April 2018, Ethiopia witnessed a surge of violent protests, particularly among the majority but marginalized Oromo ethnic group and later

the former rulers, Amhara. The protests took the lives of more than 1,000 civilians, according to reports by Human Rights Watch (BBC, 2017). The protests were intensified by collaboration with activists and bloggers based in the diaspora. The protests led to two states of emergency and forced Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn to resign from his post in February 2018 (Al Jazeera, 2018b).

As mentioned in the earlier sections, since April 2018, after the ascension of

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia has undergone tremendous changes. All journalists who have been held in custody have been released; exiled activists have returned home; and the banned media outlets have been effectively un-banned. Diaspora-based activists utilized social media to enable such changes and pressure the government to introduce changes. Despite the positive change in Ethiopia since April 2018, as discussed in the later sections, the initial high hopes were quickly dashed.

History and the State of the Media in Sudan

With their clear goal of serving their own interests, the British colonizers introduced modern media in Sudan. The foundations they left provided a structure and legacy for locally owned media outlets operated by indigenous journalists.

As Roman Deckert (2012a) in his chapter “The history of the Sudanese press:

Background to conflict” documents, the press was first introduced to the Sudan with

Anglo-Egyptians under the auspices of the British colonial power. Although its primary aim was to disseminate the British law and information, the first periodical, Sudan

Gazette, started in 1898 (p .6). Until Sudan adopted its first press law in 1930, the

Sudanese people had very little say in their own affairs. After the declaration of a

Sudanese press law, Deckert argues, the press became the main platform among the emerging Sudanese intelligentsia to articulate their demand for self-determination (p. 7).

After the country’s independence, particularly from 1956-58, Deckert (2012a) contends, the Sudan witnessed a vibrant press with more than 20 newspapers in the capital, most of them aligned to the political parties. The newly established newspapers openly debated issues of public concerns until they ran into an abrupt halt (p. 8).

Sudan’s political history is characterized by frequent military coups. The country’s volatile political climate also has been reflected in its media system. Following a military coup in 1989, led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan experienced about 30-year bleak media history. Bashir’s long years in power have been marked by a turbulent political environment and ineffective, flaccid press that have combined to place Sudan repeatedly among the 10 worst countries in Reporters Without Borders’ annual survey

(Reporters Without Borders, 2018). When Bashir took power through military coup – generally believed to be masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi – in 1989, on the first day of the coup he declared that all publications were cancelled, and licenses revoked until further notice. Jemera Rone in her book Behind the red line: Political repression in

Sudan (1996) assesses that Bashir’s new decree immediately halted the publication of more than 40 newspapers and independent magazines, leaving only the military-run media (p. 146). The author adds that although the military government started to issue licenses and reopen some publications, a new committee that included several ministers

and intelligence officers was established to oversee the new media and “counter lies.” In a matter of few months, the committee revoked the license of 15 newly reopened newspapers, sending a clear message that the regime would be less tolerant of independent thinking (p. 146). The first few years of al-Bashir’s rule proved extremely hostile both to state and independent journalists. Rone (1996) mentions that prior to

1993’s new press law, an estimated 600 journalists from independent media and 200 employees of the state media were sacked, and the military regime banned the independent Sudan Journalists’ Union (p. 145).

In 1993, Bashir allowed the publication of independent newspapers on

“competitive base (basis)” and improved the Criminal Act of 1991. However, since then journalists and media have been subjected to tight screening and a hostile political climate. Bashir’s statement regarding the private media describes his stand toward an independent press. In 1996, Bashir stated: “Press freedom must be kept within certain limits because madman whose profession is journalism could destroy all of the society with his madness, in the form of comments and opinions” (cited in Rone 1996, p. 142).

Although the 1993 press law allowed independent publications at theoretical level, the systematized control and high license fees discouraged potential investors (Deckert,

2012a, p. 13).

Due to low literacy rate in the country, especially in the early 1990s, radio and television were the primary means of mass communication and information dissemination. Due to Bashir’s tight control, a majority of broadcast radio that made a

real impact were based in the diaspora. Franka describes the changing landscape of the new media:

During Sudan’s second civil war, from 1983 to 2005, warring factions,

such as the National Democratic Alliance and southern separatist

movements such as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, operated covert

radio stations. They broadcast into Sudanese airwaves from Eritrea and

Ethiopia in order to circumvent censorship. Meanwhile, satellite dishes

grew popular among wealthy Sudanese in the 1990s. Viewers got access

to foreign broadcasts in exchange for an annual fee to the government.

(para 8).

In December 1999, in what most observers described as “palace coup,” President al-Bashir ousted the speaker of the house of parliament, Hassan al-Turabi, who was considered as an ideologue of the regime (Bellucci, 2000). Having consolidated his power, Bashir started to loosen the tight grip on media freedom. The introduction of a multi-party system allowed newspapers to emerge, yet the long-standing tradition of suspension of licenses and pre-censorship continued its after-effects and was widely manifested in the form of self-censorship (Deckert, 2012a p. 15).

The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)’s power negotiation in 2001 was another significant factor that played a positive role in that country’s media environment (Mehler, 2009). The improved political situation – or rather Bashir’s power centralization – was accompanied by improvement in the economy. Between 1999 and

2000, Sudan’s oil production led to 6 percent economic growth by 2001 (CIA, 2002).

Deckert adds that especially after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the number of Arabic daily newspapers increased from six to 17 in 2007. As conflict flared up in

Darfur in 2003 and 2008, the author argues that political newspapers became more elitist, with their primary focus on Khartoum. The Darfur war also brought to the surface what the scholar Gerard Prunier calls “an unconscious form of Sudanese cultural racism,” in which a majority of the Khartoum-based press started to frame and downplay the conflict as “tribal” (Deckert, 2012a, p.14).

Bashir’s lift of censorship and relative media freedom similarly opened a conducive environment in the Southern part of Sudan that had been experiencing tight media control. In addition to the number of short-lived publications, Southern Sudanese journalists launched The Khartoum Monitor in 2003 in Khartoum, The Sudan Mirror in

Nairobi and The Citizen and Juba Post in Juba (Deckert, 2012a, p.15).

While Bashir’s brief “media freedom” opened some small windows, it faced other challenges on the ground. Despite consolidating his power base, and seemingly promising economic revival, Bashir continued to target the free press, using various excuses. For example, when South Sudan celebrated its independence, Khartoum banned six newspapers, justifying the decision by claiming they were owned by South Sudanese

(Deckret, 2012a, p. 15).

In addition to the legal processes and controversial laws employed by Bashir’s government, another mechanism for silencing critical media involved draining access to

advertising. The government, in its various manifestations and corporations, has been the number one advertiser in the Sudan. This has exerted pressure on privately owned newspapers to compromise their stands (Fiedler, 2012). With an average print circulation of 1,000 copies each day, (el-Gizouli, 2012a) as BBC states, the opposition states its views, but the state uses its leverage to influence what is being published (BBC, 2016a).

The BBC report adds that satellite dishes, showing pan-Arab TV stations, are very common among the affluent neighborhoods of Sudan. While radio remains an important news media, with a handful of private FM stations, most of them focus on entertainment and religion. The same holds true of the few private TV stations. An exception is

Netherlands-based Radio Dabanga that targets listeners in Darfur via shortwave (BBC,

2016a; Fanack, 2017).

Despite the number of media outlets, Deckert (2012b) concludes that due to the country’s troubled history and financial constraints, the general state of the press was relatively poor. Although more than 20 media schools and departments were operating in the country, the author states, “the curricula are academic with little hands-on or on-the- job experience. Hence, their output is basic” (p. 17).

As the landscape of traditional media changed, so were the repressive states’ responses to the growing online opposition. With an estimated internet penetration of about 26 percent, (BBC, 2016a), Sudan’s growing online media started challenging the authorities. Different online platforms run by the Sudanese diaspora community have made impacts on the ground. Among others, a grassroots organization called Sudan

Change Now organized a “stay-at-home” strike in November 2016. It was reported as one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience since the biggest protest in 2013. Bashir challenged the social media activists “to come out onto the streets,” stating that his regime wouldn’t be overthrown by keyboards (Foltyn, 2017: para 3). Bashir’s government did not stop there. In order to clamp down on the growing online resistance, the government of Sudan has been collaborating with other rogue states such as the

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to extradite dissident Sudanese bloggers and social media activists. In July 2017, the Saudi government deported three Sudanese nationals:

Elgassim Mohmed Seed Ahmed, Elwaleed Imam Hassan Taha, and Alaa Aldin al-Difana for calling for civil disobedience in December 2016. All of them were immediately arrested by the Sudanese security. Similarly, in May 2018, famous Sudanese blogger,

Hisham Ali, was extradited to Sudan (Sudan Tribune, 2018).

Overview of Literature on Social Media in the Three Countries

As observed in the traditional media, in comparison to their levels of repression, very little research has been conducted on each country’s media. This is even more scanty where literature on social media is concerned. The lack of literature on media in the three countries could be attributed to two crucial factors. One is the lack of access to these countries as they are extremely unwelcoming to independent researchers.

Moreover, the possible role of social media likely has been overlooked by researchers as their level of penetration in each country was very low. This angle serves my dissertation

as important point of entry for more research. As discussed in the findings chapters, the blockage and the state suppression have yielded another worth noting result.

Another important focus, since they play a primary role in the effect of social media, is the diaspora community of each country. For example, Victoria Bernal has studied the Eritrean diaspora and its online communication extensively. In her book,

Nation as network: Diaspora, cyberspace, and citizenship (2014), the Bernal argues that the Eritrean diaspora has a strong online presence and serves as offshore civil society.

According to her line of argument the content of information being circulated by the

Eritrean diaspora websites frame agendas for discussion on most issues. Bernal believes the diaspora’s online discussions impact far surpasses empirical figures. They play a major role in shaping the narrative and de-centering the state’s unchallenged accounts.

Her study was based on a few prominent Eritrean websites run from the Eritrean diaspora.

Gagliardone & Stremlau (2011) in their article “Digital Media, Conflict and

Diasporas in the Horn of Africa” cover the challenges and opportunities of digital media in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia). The authors explain that messages circulated via internet and social media have a wider outreach than the figures of internet penetration rate show. As these societies are in transition, with limited information available, nationals are accustomed to accessing information coming from informal channels such as what’s discussed in coffee shops and other informal associations. The

research builds on my argument examining why such limited internet penetrations and extensive state policing can have wider consequences.

Despite the wide media reports, little research has been conducted into social media in Ethiopia. Lemke & Chala’s (2016) article, “Tweeting democracy: An ethnographic content analysis of social media use in the differing politics of Senegal and

Ethiopia's newspapers,” addresses some issues regarding social media in Ethiopia, including its potential, and provides a good overview of the state’s hostile responses to social media and online media at large.

There are many media and civic society reports about Sudan’s online media that deal with social media. Yet, likely due to the lack of access, not much research has dealt chiefly with the use of social media and its implications in challenging the repressive governments. Therefore, my research will attempt to connect the dots of the disjointed reports to draw a better picture of the three countries.

Literature Review: Social Media Driven Uprisings in MENA

With the advent of social media, essential information that was once exclusively produced, sifted, and disseminated through corporate or state-owned media has been decentralized and become available to ordinary citizens. The erstwhile information monopoly was challenged as citizens advanced their own narratives through user- generated social media platforms. This enabled marginalized communities to employ social media to coordinate, facilitate, and conduct demonstrations. The Occupy

movement, Spanish’s Indignados, and the popular Arab revolutions are among some of well-known uprisings facilitated through social media.

Due to its closed media systems and repressive political leadership, the Middle

East and North Africa (MENA) region bear many similarities with the three countries dealt with in my dissertation. Therefore, I will mainly focus on the MENA popular revolution in order to draw parallels. I will first discuss circumstances that led to the revolution and how social media activists managed to challenge their respective country’s media monopoly and violent responses to organize popular uprisings. Then I will anticipate possible challenges and benefits that social media activists would experience in my dissertation’s focus countries.

What is commonly referred as Arab Spring by Western media was triggered by a seemingly minor incident in Tunisia. On Dec. 17, 2010, a local street vendor, Mohamed

Bouazizi, set himself on fire in front of the city’s municipal building in Sidi Bouzid. He left a note stating that his self-immolation was intended as a protest to the repressive regime and its continued harassment. His funeral procession ultimately escalated into a demonstration and triggered tension between locals who had long suffered from economic deprivation and police brutalities. Activists started sharing graphic videos of

Bouazizi’s self-immolation and protesters’ confrontations with police. Videos and images that showed police violence, captured by mobile phones, began circulating widely on social media, sparking a flood of user-generated content. Protesters called for resistance to the government they held responsible for bleak economic conditions and repressive

state policies and actions. As the protests spread to other cities in Tunisia and activists began occupying important public spaces, the state lost control of the situation. The protests were further emboldened when Al Jazeera TV began providing live updates from activists on the ground. Ben Ali’s 23 years of despotic rule came to a halt after four weeks of protest. Within a few days of the Tunisian revolution, social media activists started calling for similar uprising in Egypt. After fierce and costly protests, Hosni

Mubarak’s regime, which had ruled Egypt with an iron fist for around 30 years, was forced to end its reign. Tunisia’s revolution inspired young people from across the region to revolt against state repression. Six out of the 22 Arab League countries – Tunisia,

Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain – experienced full-scale upheavals that either toppled the regimes or led to prolonged war (Zayani, 2016; Karolak, 2017; Özekin, &

Akkas, 2014).

Conditions that Led to Popular Uprisings

As Mohamed Zayani (2016) in his chapter “On the entangled question of media and politics in the Middle east” broadly discusses, the MENA region is best characterized by authoritarian political system, regional rivalries, conflicting state interests, and very closed media system. A rich investment in media and information technology was mainly manifested in wide penetration of satellite TV stations across the region. Except for Al

Jazeera, as most media outlets, particularly satellite TV stations, were either state-owned or by interest groups that benefit from the status quo, they provided few alternative voices (pp. 23-24).

What was singularly missing in traditional media and other public forums made a blazing return with the advent of social media. Rightly so, social media has been credited with creating increased interconnectedness and strengthening national and regional identities. Chebib & Sohail (2011) argue, the increased social ties and real-time information exchange, bypassing traditional channels of communication in the MENA region, have pushed individuals to act. In a region that long suffered from extreme centralization of information and ubiquitous censorship, social media sites opened radical new possibilities. Anonymity and horizontal communication were two vital assets that helped social media activists build confidence and relatively safe from state arrest.

Social media sites in the MENA region went beyond transcending the information blockage imposed by the respective governments to build a new bond between people.

Miller (2017) argues that apart from accessing information, social media has helped to create social harmony and strengthen relationships between citizens who were ignored by their leaders. Therefore, the author stipulates, it helped them build trust, discuss at liberty challenges they had been facing, and raise awareness of social injustice. Miller maintains that social media has emerged as the main challenger to the state in the MENA countries as a result of three distinct characteristics. First, they shifted the old analogue “one-to- many” top-down communication model to a “many-to-many” interactive model. In societies where they had been subjected to tedious state-led access to information, the author argues, the new model created immediate horizontal solidarity (2017, p. 252).

In addition to challenging the traditional communication model, the ease of production and distribution of information provided by social media sites played a big role. This new opportunity challenged the hegemonic control of the state and media corporations. Although this applies equally in democratic countries with free and independent media, in the case of MENA, whose states enjoyed a complete information monopoly, activists leapt at the opportunities offered by this new media (Miller, 2017).

Social media’s distinct facility to organize and mobilize like-minded citizens across widely dispersed geographical places was the third factor that played a major role in the popular uprising of the MENA region. In a heretofore fully closed environment,

Miller states, social media enabled activists to mobilize and create awareness, “leading to the reinvigoration of a conversational public or public sphere” (2017, p. 252). Social media activists were easily able to garner support and communicate their messages across cities and space, while inviting the diaspora/exiled community to take part.

While social media sites provided innovative ways of communication and sharing, other conditions on the ground were ripe for political changes. In this closed media environment, the predominantly alienated and disenfranchised youth population of the region became natural constituents for wide internet penetration. According to

Stepanova (2011) in 2010 internet penetration was 21 percent in Egypt, 34 percent in

Tunisia, and 88 percent in Bahrain (p. 2). It is worth noting that the success of social media as a catalyst for mobilizing disgruntled societies varied across countries and their political systems. For example, although internet penetration is believed to have played

vital role in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, others with very low internet access, such as Yemen and Libya, were influenced by the change. Internet penetration was 10 percent and 17 percent in Yemen and Libya (Karolak, 2017, p. 202), respectively, when the popular demand for change surged in each country.

Access to internet had reached a sufficient level to challenge the centralized information dissemination tradition long held by each regime. Howard and Hussain

(2011) acknowledge that internet only had 10 to 20 percent penetration in these regions where revolution took place. But the authors add, “Yet this minority is a strategic one, typically comprising an elite made up of educated professionals, young entrepreneurs, urban dwellers, and government workers. These are the people who formed the networks that initiated, coordinated, and sustained successful campaigns of civil disobedience against authoritarian rule” (2011, p. 47).

In their immediate response to halt the sudden surge of information exchange, the regimes instantly sought to block internet access in their countries. The strategy, however, did not work in these times of wide ICT networks. As Stepanova (2011) argues, the economic and reputational costs of blocking the internet surpassed its immediate perceived benefits. As governments started cracking down on the internet, social media activists came up with new solutions such as utilizing router/path diversity methods, IP proxy servers, and Google’s voice to-Twitter applications (p. 2).

Karolak (2017) writes that most of the MENA population are youth below the age of 25. The disenfranchised tech-savvy youth population of the region had been

interconnected through common destiny and popular satellite channels before kindling the revolution (p. 200). This was further strengthened by other factors such being predominantly Islamic religion, relatively similar culture across countries, and Arabic being the common language. All these factors created fertile ground for horizontal communication in which activists could easily transcend borders. As Zayani (2016) describes, “Never before have Arab politics been more connected, more informed, and more empowered” (p. 24).

For popular revolutions to take place, other factors are crucial from the government side. Stepanova (2011) argues that the government’s utilization of social media both to counter and shape the ongoing conversation is vital if they want to counter uprisings. In the case of MENA region, as most governments did not give enough weight to social media platforms beyond their personal connectivity, that conveniently played into the hands of activists. State security only realized its potential when it had gotten beyond their control. Their response at that point was either to block internet totally or arrest activists. By then, however, it was too late (p. 4).

Convergences of Alternative and Traditional Media in MENA Uprisings

Social media sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have been widely named as enablers of the popular revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Research that focused on the information-sharing process during the actual demonstrations, however, reveal the convergence of different communication systems. Wilson and Dunn (2011) conducted research on Tahrir Square shortly after Hosni Mubarak was toppled to study how

protesters were communicating and receiving information. According to their findings, the most important protest media were phone (62 percent), face-to-face conversation (48 percent), Facebook (28 percent), satellite TV (24 percent) and email (14 percent), while

Twitter covered 6 percent (p. 1254).

Access to internet was further expanded by mobile phone penetration and wide use of smart phones. During the Arab Spring, mobile phone access was at the rate of 16 percent in Yemen, 58 percent in Tunisia, 63 percent in Syria, 91 percent in Egypt, 95 percent in Libya and 133 percent in Bahrain (Hussein & Howard, 2013, p. 9). Protesters managed to capture live images of jubilant youth challenging authorities and at the same time document the wide abuses of police forces. As they uploaded images and videos captured through the mobile phones, that in turn led to outrage and motivated others to join in. It also helped spread activism beyond cities and towns and garner international attention.

Social media from the start of its availability helped in bypassing fear and pervasive censorship. Demonstrators only came out to occupy crucial places after establishing relations and building their confidence through successful social media interactions. Nanabhay and Farmanfarmaian (2011) state, “While the public sphere created in the ether was critical in breaking through the barrier of fear in Egyptian society, if Tahrir Square and other public places had not been occupied, the change would not have occurred” (p. 574). The authors argue that the revolution was only made possible through a combination of all means of communication. The cyber-activists

smartly utilized the three levels of communication – social media-generated content to create confidence, which national and international mainstream media amplified, that transformed into public outrage. Nanabhay and Farmanfarmaian (2011) contend: “It was within this amplified public sphere that activists on the street fed information onto social networks and to the mainstream media, which was then diffused nationally and internationally, further emboldening the protesters, strengthening their resolve, increasing their numbers and spreading their message. This led to an amplification of the first group of protesters, initially over the media and eventually onto the streets as more Egyptians poured out” (p. 574).

In addition to the proliferation of information sharing via Twitter feeds, SMS messages, Facebook and phone calls, traditional media played a dynamic role in creating momentum for the revolution. Zayani (2016) aptly describes it:

The traditional media’s reliance on eyewitnesses’ accounts and Facebook clips of

protest scenes originating from activists and protesters did more than create a

competing narrative to the stilted official account of the events; they helped give

additional momentum to the people’s movements. Never before had cyber-

activism and on-the-ground activism been so tightly linked. (p. 27).

Al Jazeera TV, the most watched television channel in the region, was the leading media outlet that facilitated the change. Although the station was at odds with most governments in the region and in addition was not favored internationally as a result of the many controversial programs it had aired, the station’s intense coverage of the

revolution allowed it to emerge as a credible independent news source for most demonstrators. As Bossio (2013) states, as many Al Jazeera journalists had proximity to the demonstrators, and could speak Arabic and knew the culture, this helped build confidence and allowed them to easily tap into the minds of demonstrators. Unlike other competitive international channels such as BBC or CNN, Bossio argues that Al Jazeera took another risk. As traditional reporting was repeatedly hampered by logistical difficulties, Al Jazeera heavily relied on alternative and citizen journalists for its coverage. Bossio’s findings reveal that in comparison to the other major media outlets, Al

Jazeera used twice as many references and sources from social media such as Facebook,

Twitter and micro-blogging.

Following Al Jazeera’s bold advances in Egypt, its role increased in Libya where having reporters on the ground was even more difficult. As other media sources were depending mainly on experts and eyewitnesses, Al Jazeera focused more on protesters, and “coverage of the protests was represented not as reportage or information but as the support and rallying of protesters via social media,” Bossio noted (2013, p. 338). The fact that Al Jazeera had been banned in many of the countries, including Egypt and Libya, while successfully covering the protests, gave the news channel and demonstrators further motivation to challenge state repression of media. When authorities banned Al

Jazeera and its reporters from accessing their countries, the news channel told viewers that it would consider every protester a potential reporter. As a multitude of raw images

and videos captured by citizens poured into the channel, it aired many of them, creating the illusion of proximity (Sarnelli, 2013, p. 162).

Can MENA Popular Uprisings be Replicated in the Selected Countries?

By reviewing the Arab Spring as a point of departure, my aim is to weigh the promises and perils of organizing similar revolutions in the three repressive African countries that I have chosen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. As the media sections for each country demonstrated, the three countries have been closed off to both the international community and locals. Their closed media systems, their hugely disenchanted, tech- savvy youth populations, the colossal gap between the elite in power and ordinary citizens, and the widespread accessibility of smartphones, all these factors have the potential to combine to trigger these countries’ youth to take similar initiative.

Taking the MENA experience as point of comparison, the dissertation would try to see the differences and similarities of the popular uprisings in the three selected countries. As discussed in the previous sections, steps taken by the repressive regimes included targeting social media activists and deliberately disrupting communications each time an event was gathering steam. As state security in the countries took draconian steps to halt social media-driven uprisings, social media activists adjusted their tactics and began basing their communications from their country’s diaspora community. Unlike the

MENA countries, the amount of internet penetration in the three African countries was very low. Yet, social media activists have still managed to combine various mechanisms to challenge their respective states. In the three countries, young people have been

emboldened in the face of armed repression and seem ready to take whatever risks are necessary.

Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework and Methodology

As my dissertation is concerned with the diaspora activists, I venture to discuss the intersection between the exile and homelands; their political leverages and tactics of pressuring their autocratic governments from far. After discussing the links between home and host countries and forms of exiled resistance, then I will proceed to deliberate how I plan to analyze my findings. I frame my dissertation from three theoretical underpinnings. Not necessarily the three theories I engage with are compatible with one another. Hence, I will first discuss each and what my research would borrow from each. I will wind up the theoretical frame with laying out the intersections of each.

The biggest sub-section of this chapter would then deal with methodology in collecting data. I used mixed qualitative mythology to collect data. This chapter will deal with the selection of the research informants and their possible roles on the subject. Due to volatile political situations of the three countries and fast-changing paces, I discuss political state of each country during the data collection.

Diaspora Community and the Political Influence at Homelands

Diaspora is contested space between dissidents and the state. It provides a vital aspect in understanding the prospects and difficulties social media activists face in challenging their homelands’ repressive governments. In an increasingly intertwined world, where communication and movement have become easier, the diaspora communities have bigger stakes both at home and host countries. Homi Bhabha (1990) stipulates the nation’s ties through cultural and political compassions extend beyond

fixed geographical boundaries. Such allegiances, as Bhabha argues, has progressive potential in cultivating “politics of differences” (3). Such exposure and being in-between spaces enable the diaspora community to serve as mediators between host and home countries.

The diaspora community may influence developments in their homeland in various ways. As Arjun Appadurai (1996) wrote, he categorizes them as five intersecting flows: ethnoscapes which is the shifting of the world; technoscapes understood as the flow technology; the increasing flows and movements of capital called, financescapes; mediascapes which constitutes the flow of images and sound; and finally, ideoscapes, which deals with information and political flows (1996, pp. 33–37). As such flows considerably shape the economy, culture and politics of the home countries, the diaspora communities are given much weight by governments. As Gamlen (2014) identifies, an apparent apparatus of incorporating the diaspora communities is through opening institutions and offices that deal with emigrants and their descendants. Such formal institutions serve as mediators between the two. Beyond opening offices, there are other mechanisms where the state tries to engage its diaspora community. Among others,

Gamlen notes, it includes voting rights, permanent quotas in government legislative seats, and active engagements with politics at home (2014, p. 184). While such rights and engagements foster mutual benefits for the two sides, the case has been different for most authoritarian regimes. In what Anderson (1998) describes as “long-distance nationalists,”

dissidents in the diaspora, serve as an offshore opposition to challenge their repressive regimes. This is due to lack of space inside their countries to freely exercise their rights.

As “locus of new form of political practice,” (Laguerre, 2006, p. 2); diaspora community approach politics at home from a special position. It allows them to combine and establish linkages between host and homelands; within diaspora communities of the host land; and between diasporic communities of different sites. Activists operate within transnational and local circuits; hence, it helps them transfer experiences and gives more leverages.

With increased access of communication and relatively free information flow, the diaspora becomes a highly contested area for influence. Adamson and Demetriou (2007) contend that the states discover a great potential in transnational identities which contributes significantly to the economy and political leverages. Equally, opposition groups have a bigger pool to recruit their constituents who are financially better off despite other challenges. As the authors note, although it is difficult to homogenize the diaspora communities, not necessarily all of them are pro-democracy and they have equal potential to support the repressive regime at home.

The relations dynamism between state agencies and how dissidents operate in a third space under unfavorable conditions is worth noting. As Tarrow (2005) states, exiles from repressive regimes do not necessarily enjoy full freedom of expression and civic rights irrespective of the freedom granted by host countries. Having rare access and proximity with events on the ground permits them to channel criticism and attract

attention to the victims of the state abuse inside the country. While dissidents use resources and their influences on lobby and pressure their home governments from far, the state equally invests to shape the diaspora politics and cultivate support. On top of recruiting supporters, the state heavily works to discredit dissidents and limit their influences.

In what Moss (2016) dubbed as “transnational repression” (481) authoritarian states permeate their geographical borders to extend their retaliatory actions and target activists in exile. Although the use of lethal force is not very common as it causes diplomatic backlash in the host country, yet, the state uses different mechanisms to silence dissidents. Moss argues, authoritarian regimes either through extended surveillance of their official representatives abroad or other informal networks monitor activities of dissidents. Consular offices and missions serve as gatekeepers to monitor, implant ideologies of home governments, and wield power if deemed necessary.

Although most dissidents cut ties with the government and do not expect any services, yet the state enjoys extensive control. As Moss (2016) elaborates some of the widely practiced mechanisms include threatening the well-beings of family members at home; socially outcast vocal critics from their circles to reduce their influence; and create fear and mistrust in groups.

Nonviolent Resistance

Having highlighted the contesting spheres of influence in the diaspora, this section will deal with types of resistance exiled communities wage to exert the political

pressures of home countries. Exiled activists combine different forms of resistance to delegitimize their repressive governments at home and garner wider support. Despite the limited leverage of nonviolent resistance, diaspora activists work to dismantle the structures that hold the repressive state intact. Exiled activists employ different nonviolent mechanisms to loosen the state’s hegemony.

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who came up with the concept, argues that hegemony is maintained through a combination of the coercive armors of the state and the subjects’ consent. On top of the coercive institutions such as the army and police, media, education, religious institutions, etc., are state apparatus that help maintain hegemony (Gramsci, 1992, p. 263). Therefore, activists must use different mechanisms to challenge and reclaim these institutions.

There are many ways activists can challenge state hegemony from far. Solt (2015) writes that the three most common forms of nonviolent protest are signing petitions, boycotting products, and taking part in demonstrations (p. 1316). Various successful nonviolent transitions have adopted some or combinations of all. India’s Mohandas

Karamchand Gandhi, who used nonviolence struggle against British colonial powers that ruled India, is considered as an icon of nonviolence struggle and inspired many others to follow suit. American civil rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr, is among the few who have adopted Gandhi’s nonviolence struggle.

One close example that can be discussed in this context is South Africa. South

Africa’s struggle against the white minority is cited as one of the most successful

nonviolent transitions. In his book Hegemony and resistance (2018), Thiven Reddy documents how the apartheid state – through its dominant organizations, various laws, military and economic advantages – persistently subjugated the black majority. To counter the state’s discourse and empower their constituents, organizations and movements, including the ANC, PAC, BCM, UM, and SACP, “weaved together hybrid set of idea and practices to ‘mobilize, educate, and organize’ the subaltern into a social force of resistance and transformation; in other words they wanted to translate resistance from ‘hidden script’ into the ‘public script.’” (p. 183). These organizations worked to disseminate enlightening banned texts to make them available to the masses and educate them about the ongoing repression. Such tasks were undertaken by educated members of the organizations, with the banned materials to be distributed underground. During different periods in time, the author reports how these organizations adopted various mechanisms such as boycotting, riots, and collective civil disobedience. In order to spread their resistance, they had to actively recruit members and broaden their constituency.

With advancements in technological tools, the landscape of nonviolent resistance is undergoing dramatic shifts. Smartphones and broadband internet connections have intensified communication and political engagements. Added to the modern equipment is the emergence of social network sites. As social network sites bridge the geographical gap, activists have an easier time coordinating events and taking actions across countries.

Miller (2017) states, the online communication is characterized with intense political

engagement. Although the levels of efficacy might vary, social network sites have brought politics into the home, an effective departure from the previous structures of organizing along political parties and unions.

Prior to the emergence of social media, when the flow of information and communication could be difficult, diaspora activists were forced to use other mechanisms, and that took time. With the fast flow of communication nowadays, however, the diaspora can play a crucial role both in exposing their repressive government at home and drawing international attention. According to Anden-

Papadopoulos & Pantti’s (2013) study of diaspora activists in the war in Syria, activists serve as brokers in (a) amplifying the voices of protest inside the country, (b) mediating messages between social and mainstream media, and (c) working with professional journalists in translating messages so that they could reach the wider world.

As social media bridges the geographical gap, it becomes easier for the diaspora activists to access information from their contacts at home; process and disseminate it both to those who are staying inside the country and the international community. The fact that accessing basic information is nearly impossible in most repressive regimes, alternative media can report otherwise censored or blocked information (Syvertsen,

2017). Although the state uses different coercive mechanisms to circumvent the flow of information, exiled activists employ other mechanisms to fill the information gap.

When activists lack empirical facts to challenge the state elites’ propaganda and deliberate misinformation, satire becomes one weapon at hand to challenge and de-

legitimate false claims. Extensive use of satire in different forms can effectively resist the hegemony when information is acutely lacking. Political satire, whether in the form of jokes, online memes and satirical writings, has been a common mechanism of resistance from exile. In places where other forms of open resistance are impossible, satire is widely used to ridicule, criticize and expose political figures and events. O’Donnell and

Schmitter argue that satirists reveal the political elite’s pretense by subjecting it to ridicule and jokes (2013, p. 57). Unlike in democratic countries where comedians host

TV shows for such purposes, authoritarian regimes leave no space for such practices.

Hence, user-generated online memes and jokes are common in such occasions (Yang and

Jiang, 2015).

Theoretical Frame in Analyzing the Social Media Driven Resistances

The dissertation uses three theoretical frameworks to analyze and discuss how social media helped to challenge the state repression. It draws theoretical underpinning mainly from Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere and Michel Foucault’s concept of speaking truth to power. On top of that I use Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

(2012)’s framing of social media sites as disruptors of the status quo. Considering the widespread repression on one hand and the continued resistance of social media activists on the other, I will position how each theory applies in the subsequent sections. After discussing independently each how I applied each theory in my dissertation, then I will see the intersections and the differences of each theory. As can be deduced from the following sections, I apply three different theories and it is imperative that I discuss their

core differences and their intersection. Due to the nature and extent of the struggle, I found it difficult to entirely apply on one theory.

Applying the Public Sphere Theory

In his book The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (original 1962; 1991), Jürgen Habermas describes the concept, “the sphere of private people come together as a public.... to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant spheres of commodity exchange and social labor” (p. 27).

Although public sphere was not fully attained, according to Habermas, it started to get diluted towards the middle of 19th century, due to many reasons. Habermas explains the reason behind weakening of the public sphere:

The bourgeois ideal type assumed that out of the audience-oriented subjectivity's

well-founded interior domain a public sphere would evolve in the world of letters.

Today, instead of this, the latter has turned into a conduit for social forces

channeled into the conjugal family's inner space by way of a public sphere that

the mass media have transmogrified into a sphere of culture consumption. The

deprivatized province of interifrity was hollowed out by the mass media; a

pseudo-public sphere of a no longer literary public was patched together to create

a sort of superfamilial zone of familiarity. Since the middle of the nineteenth

century, the institutions that until then had ensured the coherence of the public as

a critically debating entity have been weakened. (p. 162)

It was mainly advertisements and radio commercials which started to reach and attract mass audience that have weakened the public sphere. As elucidated by Habermas,

“The trickling down of commodities formerly restricted to the higher strata attracted greater attention among those strata which, through their style of consumption, were trying to elevate themselves at least symbolically” (p. 191)

The concept of public sphere is central to my theoretical argument because social media activists by their nature are concerned private citizens who come together to discuss issues of great public interest. The fact that Habermas’ public sphere is conceived by concerned citizens built along horizontal lines of information flow, as opposed to a top-down state/corporation centered approach, fits into my theoretical argument.

In the three selected countries, new technology and easy access challenged the state monopoly of information and centralization. This enabled wider share of information by ordinary citizens. Habermas argues that ideal public spheres were formulated outside the influence of the state, by concerned citizens, mostly in salons and coffee-shops. In many ways, the liberalization of media and availability of communication tools have undercut the repressive states’ centralized information control.

The proliferation of information exchange and interactivities of concerned citizens in areas of wider public interest leads to substantial expansion of the public spheres.

Social media sites have been lauded as revitalizing the public sphere. They have considerably changed the landscape of information flow and modes of communication.

The spontaneous, uncensored, and uninterrupted flow of information exchange can

potentially formulate the collective public opinion. Homero Gil de Z��iga (2015) describes their emerging roles:

Social media have been lauded for their potential to affect democratic outcomes

by providing easy access to information, lowering the bar to political

participation, providing a platform for individuals to express their political

opinions, and allowing networks of politically minded citizens to connect with

one another and organize, despite geographical or cultural barriers. (P. 3154)

Z��iga adds that all these characteristics are “necessary conditions to develop, nurture, and strengthen a healthy public sphere” (P. 3154). Similarly, Christian Fuchs

(2014a) argues, although social media platforms might slightly depart from Habermas’ public sphere, they still follow the same model of “networking, dissent, novelty, and culture,” and adds that they also “have in common that they are philosophically idealistic interpretations or revisions of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere.” Fuchs further argues that although Habermas stressed the economic materiality of the public sphere, the modern public sphere is primarily concerned with political and cultural communication and ignores the economic aspects (p. 57). Else, he has broadly argued the circular nature of social media sites that only benefit the top. In his book Digital labor and Karl Marx

(2014b,) Fuchs expresses his wariness about the liberating potential of the social media sites that solely depend on free labor. In what the author describes as “prosumer”—to indicate the producer and at the same time consumer—the giant tech-companies have created a ubiquitous capitalist world. Yet, Fuchs stresses one should neither

underestimate nor overstate the role of social media in contemporary social movements.

He states they, “are likely to have contradictory character: they do not necessarily and automatically support/amplify or dampen/limit rebellions but rather pose contradictory potential that stand in contradiction to influences by the state, ideology and capitalism”

(2014b, p. 333).

Although Fuchs’ positioning of social media sites as instruments of bigger capitalist structure can’t be ignored, still other media scholars emphasize their networking potential. For example, Shirky (2011) contends that the greater access to information and suitable platforms to create networked population of social media create fertile ground for collective action. “Public sphere develops,” argues Shirky, “where public opinion relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the environmental view of Internet freedom” (p. 34). He states the networking aspect of social media, particularly with politically motivated groups and users, is consistent with their messaging and aggressive approach. As authoritarian regimes attempt to limit access, the author argues, “social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it” (p. 30).

Social media sites as restoration of public sphere mainly emanates from their potential to redefine communicative power relations. As Loader & Mercea (2011) maintain, such decentralized platforms help, “challenge the monopoly control of media production and dissemination by state and commercial institutions. Freed from the

necessities of professional media and journalist skills or the centralized control and distribution of industrial mass media organizations, social media is instead seen to be technologically, financially and (generally) legally accessible to most citizens living in advanced societies” (p. 759). Adding that, “Equipped with social media, the citizens no longer have to be passive consumers of political party propaganda, government spin or mass media news, but are instead actually enabled to challenge discourses, share alternative perspectives and publish their own opinions” (p. 759).

Other researchers, however, are wary of the argument that social media sites can be considered as revivals of public sphere. Kruse, Norris, & Flinchum (2018) argue that social media’s distinct characteristics, such as online harassment and surveillance, and the engagement of mostly like-minded individuals, promotes an echo chamber of “happy interactions” as opposed to freely and reliably engaging communications. Van Dijck

(2012), similarly states that social media platforms cannot be considered as a recalibration of Habermas’ public sphere as they are new spaces where private, public, and corporate interests compete to form new modes of connectivity.

While I am aware of the two opposing views as to whether social media can be considered as new sites of the public sphere, I fall in line with the scholars who argue social media sites as renewal of public sphere. As interested in the political aspect of social media, I use the argument forwarded by scholars who state that particularly in the area of political change they can be considered a revival of the public sphere.

For citizens to make informed decisions, Habermas believes, they should have free and equal access to information. He is not optimistic that state/corporate media can guarantee free expression. He argues, “Free expression of opinion by the press can no longer be regarded as part of the traditional expression of opinion by individuals as private people” (1991, p. 227). In the most repressive countries, however, even a minimum level of media freedom and basic information dissemination is not met.

Citizens, therefore, strive to achieve free and equal access to information through social media. The fact that social media activists strive to guarantee free and equal access to information places my dissertation in the rubric of Habermas’ notion of public sphere.

Habermas considered face-to-face communication as the core feature of the public sphere. But the digital world has transformed the face-to-face interaction, which also has extended the outreach and influence. Ingrid Volkmer in her book The global public sphere (2014) argues that with the new communication tools, we have achieved transnational public spheres. Despite the transformation of communicative structure,

Volkmer writes, thoughts are still conversed within the context of modern nation-states.

The technological innovation enables people to bridge the geographical gap, which

Volkmer considers its biggest asset: “Specifically the intensified forms of networked communication become the sites of communicative public ‘action’ among citizens who might never meet in person as they are situated in different world regions as well as different society types” (2014, p. 6).

Centralization and limitations on internet access are shared characteristics of the countries in my dissertation. As internet penetration is very low in each of the three countries, the effect and reach of social media-driven changes could be overlooked. As mentioned in the literature review section, however, the effects of such alternative media outlets are greater than normally expected in repressive regimes. I frame my theoretical discussion of this effect from what Volkmer calls the “matrix of influence.” The author discusses the concept in the context of globalized and democratic media. A similar model of information sharing in autocratic countries also can be applied.

To some observers, the geographical disparities and lack of physical contacts might be considered a challenge to securing change. Nancy Fraser in her article

“Transnationalizing the public sphere” (2007) argues, the new global world order and means of communication have overcome former challenges created by territorial boundaries, as most issues debated “are inherently trans-territorial” (p. 14) and cannot be limited to a confined space. I use Fraser’s argument that modern media can knit together widely dispersed social media activists to formulate and consolidate public opinion. It is mainly through transborder and transnational spaces that such communications were made possible.

Applying Speaking Truth to Power

Speaking truth to power is widely used concept in which the speaker – who tells truth to authorities – does so with far less power and without protection but nonetheless speaks at great risk of reprisal for the greater public good. The fact that social media

activists do not have protection before the law within their home countries and speak at a greater risk of being exiled and harassed qualifies as speaking truth to power.

To elaborate how the concept fits into my theoretical framework, I will first discuss the origin and ancient practice of speaking truth to power. The ancient Greco-

Roman tradition had a concept called parrhesia, which appears in texts and dramas of

Greco-Roman tradition from fifth century B.C to fifth century A.D.

Michel Foucault’s late public lectures provide an insight about the concept of parrhesia. Toward his final days, in his lecture series delivered at Berkley University, which was later transcribed, edited, and published under Fearless Speech (2001), he describes parrhesia:

a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has specific relation to the truth

through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain

type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or

criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom

and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker

expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he

recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help others (as well as himself).

(p. 19)

Parrhesia differs from the popular tradition of rhetoric in several ways. Foucault elaborates, “In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and

security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy” (p. 20).

The fact that speakers, in the ancient tradition, risked losing friends, being placed in exile, and perhaps losing their life is not dissimilar to the case of modern social media activists who also are ready to take the risks. Social media activists do not necessarily need to compose well-crafted articles that meet the journalistic standards. This is like the parrhesia tradition of using everyday language and being more concerned with the message than the art of persuasion.

Both parrhesiastes and social media activists also speak truth to power in order to correct wrongdoings committed by the people in power and do so without legal protection. Social media activists, as in old tradition of parrhesia, ask questions and shake the status quo without necessarily fitting into the rubric of pre-established ideological frames.

This modern phenomenon of laypeople voicing their opinion, rather than established political parties is another intersection between social media activism and the tradition of parrhesia. Both parrhesia and social media activism call for empowerment of laypeople to take part in decisions that concern them.

As discussed in the preceding section, my dissertation benefited from theoretical argument from Habermas’ public sphere. However, it is challenging to wholly apply

Habermas’ notion of the public sphere in studying the role of social media in challenging the autocratic states. Some of the basic characteristics of Habermas’ argument, such as

equal access to information and uninterrupted communication for a common good, are nearly impossible in autocratic states. Social justice clearly cannot be reached working within the power structures of these governments. Rather, my dissertation studies how the extreme centralization of power has been challenged through protest, agitation, and resistance, and countering the information solely communicated through the power structure.

Apart from the ancient practice of parrhesia, many contemporary leaders and intellectuals have led their entire lives using peaceful means to resist their government’s repression, propaganda and misinformation. India’s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

("Mahatma" Gandhi) and leading public Palestinian intellectual Edward Said are two examples that demonstrate the concept of speaking truth to power. Said is often referred to as an intellectual who lived his entire life resisting Western media’s accepted framing of Palestine and Islam. In his book Peace and its discontents (1995), Said states, “The role of the intellectual is to say the truth to power, to address the central authority in every society without hypocrisy, and to choose the method, the style, the critique best suited for these purposes” (p. 184).

Various scholars have attempted to see how the ancient practice of parrhesia can be applied to examine contemporary issues. Bang (2014) discusses parrhesia and how the practice is in opposition to rote obedience and extreme state policing widely observed in modern states. Dyrberg (2016) argues that the hallmarks of parrhesia – truth telling, sense of judgement and dedication, and personal integrity – are the main tenants of

modern democracy. Happe (2015) writes that the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which protesters exposed themselves to harm in order to express themselves can be considered a modern version of parrhesia. Nayar (2010), meanwhile, posits that

Wikileaks has redefined information culture and is an ideal example demonstrating the restoration of parrhesia. Protest police brutalities and systemic discriminations signals the resurrection of parrhesia for some. As Sokhi-Bulley (2015) contends, 2014 Ferguson

Protest is one example. For Sokhi-Bulley the act of resistance that included even violent protest, looting and arson are another manifestation of parrhēsia, because it is “to refuse suffering and refuse governments that have neglected to recognize the social situation of poverty and disaffection in which they are forced to live” adding it is “an ethical and acceptable response to a form of conducting power that it was no longer proper to obey”

(2015, p. 8). My dissertation taps into the growing scholarship on the concept and its application in social media led movements.

Social Media Sites as Disruptors

The third theoretical frame I used in my dissertation is based on Antoni Negri and

Michael Hardt. The two scholars, starting with their book Empire (2000), dealt with how to destroy the empire that is currently ruling the world through the increasingly centralized power of a few countries and multinational corporations. In what the authors call a pamphlet, Declaration (2012) Hardt and Negri also address the post-2010 social media driven political and economic upheavals that spread across the world. The movement that started with protests of repressive states in the Middle East and North

Africa quickly spread across Europe and America, with activists in each place demanding improved living conditions and decentralization of power. The authors elaborate that while each struggle was adapted to specific local conditions, they all represented local battles against tyrannical and abusive power structures.

Hardt and Negri (2012) argue that the power decentralization of the social media driven movements is their best trait, because:

The movements' refusal to have a leader was recognizable throughout the year but

perhaps was most pronounced in Wall Street. A series of intellectuals and

celebrities made appearances at Zuccotti Park, but no one could consider any of

them leaders; they were guests of the multitude. From Cairo and Madrid to

Athens and New York, the movements instead developed horizontal mechanisms

for organization. They didn't build headquarters or form central committees but

spread out like swarms, and most important, they created democratic practices of

decision making so that all participants could lead together. (N/A)

Another feature of such decentralized resistance, according to the authors, is the struggle for the common people. As discussed in different contexts concerning the

Occupy protest and the Middle East, the movements drew greater support because they were organically shaped as an outcry for the economic blight of citizens. Although the authors acknowledge the oversaturation of information due to the social media network sites and mediatized laboring practice, yet they see them as outlets for making calls to come together and physically occupy or demonstrate.

My dissertation embraces two theoretical aspects from Hardt and Negri (2012).

One is the lack of centralized figures who are shaping the movement. The social media driven resistance against Africa’s most repressive states has no central commanding positions or leaders. Although some critics have considered the lack of centralization within such resistance a disadvantage, Hardt and Negri consider it their greatest asset. In addition to no central leaders, most of the social media activists are widely dispersed and are not guided by charters. In line with their argument, I also see the potential of such decentralized resistance in challenging autocratic regimes from different directions.

The Intersection of the Three Theories

The three theories I used do not necessarily fall in line with one another. It is important that I discuss their differences and what my dissertation owes to each.

Habermas (1991) and Foucault (2001) approach building democracy and civil society through different angles. Hardt and Negri (2012) diametrically oppose the established ways of building a democratic society and advocate for shaking the status quo. By doing so, the authors argue, a new order can be created that allows for fair distribution of resources that guarantees equal rights.

Hardt and Negri propose a radical route, while Habermas and Foucault have more conventional approaches to establishing a democratic society. One fundamental difference is that while Habermas has advocated for consensus, Foucault encourages conflict and tension. For Habermas one defining aspect of citizenship is taking part in public debate. Through debate and open discussion, Habermas believes a society can

reach a consensus about conflicting issues. He states, “A public sphere as a functional element in the political realm posed the issue of pouvoir as such. Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all” (pp. 82-83).

As Flyvbjerg (1998) puts it, Habermas’ notion of democracy is “linked to judicial institutionalization,” (p. 214). For Foucault, civil society itself is the core of the power struggle and conflicting interests. Without getting sidetracked trying to forge compromise, Foucault believes a good citizen can openly challenge the establishment. In his research of parrhesia, he emphasized the genealogy of power, to which Habermas doesn’t fully subscribe.

Habermas and Foucault also have significant disparities in their emphasis on democratic outcome. Habermas has studied the bourgeois, an exclusive class. For him, an ideal public sphere can be formulated by elites who meet in exclusive spaces and do not allow women and commoners. Foucault, on the other hand, does not believe that elites solely can produce the ideas that best serve an entire society. Instead, he emphasizes the lowest strata of the society, people without agency to speak. In his study of parrhesia,

Foucault argues that any member of society who sees an imminent threat can freely share his concern for the betterment of their community. He believes respect in differences is essential in building organic society and functioning democracy:

[T]he difference between the good and the bad orator does not lie primarily in the

fact that one gives good while the other gives bad advice. The difference lies in

this: the depraved orators, who are accepted by the people, only say what the

people desire to hear. Hence, Isocrates calls such speakers flatterers. The honest

orator, in contrast, has the ability, and is courageous enough, to oppose the demos.

He has a critical and pedagogical role to play which requires that he attempt to

transform the will of the citizens so that they will serve the best interests of the

city. (p. 82)

Foucault adds, the “opposition between the people's will and the city's best interests is fundamental” (p. 82) to democratic institutions of the city-state.

Due to their nature, style, and differing access of information, none of the three theories is ideal for analyzing my findings. That is why take a specific line of argument from each theory. Habermas’ public sphere theory broadly frames my argument, as social media activists are concerned citizens who come together to privately discuss issues of greater public interest. The free flow of information, uninterrupted communication, and conducive environment, however, mean that social media-driven activism falls short of encapsulating Habermas’ ideal public sphere. An attempt to create common consensus against repressive governments in order to challenge them is another aspect that social media activists borrow from the concept of a public sphere.

My dissertation draws some theoretical underpinning from Foucault’s idea of speaking truth to power. Social media activists resort to their particular communication

platform as means of challenging the repressive regimes because they otherwise lack free access and protection.

The fight for injustice at the risk of state reprisals is what makes social media activists a sort of contemporary parrhesiastes. Social media activists find themselves in even a worse position than parrhesiastes because they do not have protectors, and hence are living examples of the worst consequences of the exercise of parrhesia. The lack of free space to exercise their rights without retribution is an aspect where social media activists do not squarely dovetail with the rubric of the ancient practice of parrhesia.

The different roles that social media activists play in challenging repressive regimes could not be analyzed solely through the prism of the two theories. Challenging the information blockage and status quo through decentered mechanisms is another important angle of my dissertation. This is what Hardt and Negri also proposed in their

Declaration (2012). Before even attempting to establish a system, social media activists strive to dismantle the existing structure of the repressive regimes. How they work to disrupt status-quo is an important aspect of my dissertation. Therefore, in addition to the two broader theoretical underpinnings, I applied the disruptive aspect from Hardt and

Negri.

Methodology

Research Questions

The dissertation attempts to address the following research questions:

1. How do diaspora social media activists from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and

Sudan access information despite the heavy state impositions? How do they verify

facts?

2. What kinds of challenges do activists face from their respective

governments and how do they overcome it in receiving and imparting

information?

3. How do social media activists from these countries combine the offline

and online activism?

Reflexivity

As my dissertation deals with a subject matter that directly affects me, I should clarify my position. I am an Eritrean citizen and exiled journalist. While working as freelance journalist in Eritrea, I was declared “national security threat” who should

“immediately be restrained” by then minister of information, Ali Abdu. The public notice was published in the state newspaper on April 21st, 2009.

After I left the country in 2012, I continue to write for different international media. In July 2017, when Al Jazeera English published one of my articles, the Eritrean ministry of information issued an official response calling me “a notorious author who routinely engages in a smear campaign against the country” (Ministry of information,

Government of Eritrea, 2017).

I frequently receive hate messages; continue to be trolled by regime supporters in the diaspora and have been subjected to character assassination by many pro-government

websites. The aim is to discredit my claims and delegitimize what I write about the country and its leadership. On March 19, 2018, I wrote a response to an unusual interview broadcast on Eritrean state TV. A long-ailing woman testified that she had been healed from her prolonged illness after touching the president's hands. I wrote the response in Tigrinya and posted it on my blog. Few hours later, Facebook banned my blog post from being shared on their platforms stating it violates their community standards and “carried abusive content.” Facebook acted without verifying the content.

The next day, on March 20, 2018, my blog was attacked with malware and was put down for day until I was able to recover it by contacting my host.

I consider myself as part of the ongoing social media activism for change in

Eritrea. Therefore, I position myself as an active participant of the research. In addition to my personal involvement, my homeland, Eritrea, has a close geographical proximity to the two neighboring countries – Ethiopia and Sudan. The cultural familiarity and relative access to language, particularly Amharic, Ethiopia’s official language, helps me explore the subject more deeply.

Data Gathering Process

After my proposal was approved, I embarked on data collection and field research. It is important to discuss the process, including the procedures I followed, the challenges I faced, and how I tried to overcome them. I used mixed qualitative methods of data collection. As an active social media user, particularly of Facebook and Twitter, I have closely followed developments in the three countries. Beyond following these

developments out of my own interest, I used two approaches to conduct my field research.

My initial approach of data collection involved using participant observation or

“webservation” as described by Varisco (2002). Participatory observation, as Glaser

(2005) stipulates, permits researchers to closely observe interactions, with the option of either participating or just remaining impartial observers. I studied major discussions that took place on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and mixed multi-media posts of each country between February 2018 and early February 2020. I took notes on the developments, engagements and influencers, as well as the overall interactions. This helped me identify the key personalities from each country. Then I subscribed to numerous pertinent

Facebook pages, following or “friending” the most influential activists from the three selected countries.

As stated previously, I focused on three social media platforms: Facebook,

Twitter, and blogs. During my research, I would start with traditional media coverage, then descend into blogging and other interactive platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

My field research on Twitter has been very accessible and relatively easy to keep up with, thanks to the hashtags of the different campaigns.

Then I started analyzing the interactions through the prism of Critical Discourse

Analysis. I chose this approach to investigate how social media activists, positioned from a disadvantaged perspective, have challenged their respective governments. If not able to

provide an alternative, how did they counter the state’s propaganda and speak truth to power in the face of a hostile environment at great personal risk?

During my field research, as I framed my theory using Foucault’s “speaking truth to power” or the longtime Greco-Roman tradition of parrhesia, besides the public sphere theory, I observed with considerable interest how social media activists have revived the ancient tradition in a new way. During my long period of field research, I paid keen attention to the interactions between the social media activists, their campaigns, how each campaign changes, how they fill the information gap, etc. This field study later helped me to corroborate my observations when I interviewed the leading social media activists from each studied country.

Being an engaged citizen myself, I have participated in various social media task forces that attempt to coordinate, lead, and shape the conversation on Eritrean matters.

Such opportunities enabled me to closely witness the interaction, dynamism and engagement of social media activists behind the scenes. During interview sessions when I communicated with social media activists from other countries, I learned that they use a similar style of rigorous discussion and share resources before initiating a campaign or actively engaging on certain agendas.

Having closely followed the most popular social media platforms of each country,

I proceeded to interview some of the leading social media activists from the three countries. I focused on the diaspora activists; apart from one in Sudan, the rest of the participants are based in the U.S.A., Germany, U.K., Australia, Sweden, Switzerland,

Canada, The Netherlands, and Uganda. Despite huge geographical gaps, social media and online activism created transnational imagined communities that enabled easier access and interactions. Over the long course of my field study, I established a good rapport with most of the leading activists. This eased the process when I later approached them for an interview. My positions as a researcher and engaged activist have helped give me confidence when interviewing leading activists, making these occasions more comfortable for all involved. Similarly, my social media engagement and activism at large have enabled me to explore the actual challenges faced by most activists.

Having closely following the overall interactions, I managed to frame my interviews in a semi-structured, in-depth manner. My questions varied according to the participants and their country. However, I employed similar themes both as a way of establishing consistency and detecting the parallels within and across countries.

I have inquired about first the personal and later the collective experiences in order to draw out parallels (if they exist) among the social media activists in the studied countries. Some of my recurring questions sought to address how social media activists access information from the ground despite strict restrictions imposed by each state’s security apparatus and a greater web of online and offline surveillance that seeks to curb the flow of information. Other issues I explored included the link between activists’ online and offline activities, particularly how they reach their constituents on the ground.

Each government has been taking (and in some cases still taking) repressive steps to disrupt the smooth flow of information through various ways. The most common

mechanisms employed to instill fear and curb the flow of information include: internet blackouts (in Ethiopia and Sudan), declarations of states of emergency that would mainly target social media and the internet at large (Ethiopia and Sudan), deliberate extremely slow connection to discourage users from accessing the internet (Eritrea), phone tapping and targeting activists, etc. During my interview sessions, I asked the participants how they deal with such issues and avoid risking their contacts on the ground.

Besides communicating with activists on the ground, verification and fact- checking is a big challenge in such precarious situations. Added to this challenge is how the security apparatus of each state tries to tarnish the credibility of diaspora-based activists through deliberate misinformation and other ways of spreading fake news. I was interested in understanding how the leading activists were fact-checking the tips they receive before disseminating them to a wider audience, which often would be picked up by international media. Another concern that I explored with the participants was threats and how they handle them – from outright trolling to hacking to death threats.

Many of the social media activists write/contribute for local or international media. How social media has been instrumental in facilitating the conversation was another point of entry in my interviews. Finally, I asked all participants to share with me some of the negative consequences of social media they have experienced.

Selection of Participants

I conducted 29 interviews with social media activists from the three countries.

Thirteen of the participants are women while the other 16 are men. Except for one activist

based in Sudan, the rest live in the diaspora. The interviews took between 30 minutes and an hour. In most cases, the interview would be followed by written exchanges via

WhatsApp or other encrypted messaging apps such as Signal, in order to elaborate or provide materials that were discussed in the interview.

Eight of the participants are Eritrean social media activists. As an active participant on social media and Eritrean media, I selected four women and four men regarded as leading social media activists or drivers of significant events. Meron

Estefanos, a prominent Eritrean human rights activist and radio host who has been invited to and participated in various international platforms, is significant voice in the social media. Daniel Mekonnen is a prominent Eritrean human rights lawyer and organizer of major demonstrations. Mekonnen served as a co-facilitator of a task force that collected testimonials to be submitted to the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Eritrea.

I selected him for the interview because he has been using social media such as Paltalk and Facebook to call on Eritreans to report to the commission and demonstrate. Vanessa

Tsehaye, a Swedish-born Eritrean who advocates for the release of her jailed journalist uncle (since 2001) and founder of One Day Seyoum, has been among the most vocal activists. She spearheaded many campaigns aimed at the international community and diaspora-born Eritreans. Exiled journalist Zecarias Gerrima is program director of

ERISAT, a diaspora-based satellite TV station launched in December 2018 and broadcast to Eritrea. As the TV station resembles citizen journalism and mainly culls its contents from social media, Gerrima was selected to provide insight on the merging of traditional

and social media. The rest were similarly selected for their active engagements on social media and leadership in social media campaigns.

I have been following events in Sudan not only for my research, but out of proximity and their implications on Eritrea. Although I had established contacts with many Sudanese activists, my main point of entry during this research was Isma’il

Kushkush, a Sudanese-American journalist who writes for The New York Times, CNN and other big media such as The New Yorker. Apart from Kushkush, who has written extensively and given interviews during the long Sudanese uprising, I interviewed Husam

Osman Mahjoub, among the founders of Sudan Bukra TV. Sudan Burka is a citizen journalism TV network that was launched during the uprising to help bridge the information gap and circumvent the internet blockage in Sudan. Through Mahjoub, I was introduced to Dr. Sara Abdelgelil, president of the Sudan Doctors Union in the U.K., and one of the spokespersons for the Sudanese Professionals Association (the group that spearheaded the revolution in Sudan). As I wanted to hear the perspectives of the younger generation both from inside Sudan and outside, I interviewed Sara Sinada, the Australia- based co-founder of Media for Justice in Sudan, whose campaigns have been picked by major media outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and others. In order to see the interaction between the diaspora and activists on the ground, I interviewed the spokesperson of Sudan Change Now, a grassroots organization that led the September

2013 protest that took the lives of more than 200 Sudanese. To place the matter in a greater context, I interviewed prominent Doha-based Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih,

who has been very vocal since the so-called Arab Spring. Prominent Sudanese blogger and academic Magdi el-Gizouli was selected to place the matters into a wider perspective. Others were selected due to their engagement and active participation on social media.

If not as keenly as the situation in Eritrea, I have been following the Ethiopian political development closely since sometime around 2013. Two significant developments were observed in the Ethiopian social media-sphere. One was the Zone 9 bloggers, collective bloggers who were arrested in April 2014. Edom Kassaye, one of two women among the Zone 9 Bloggers, was pursuing her graduate studies in the U.S.A. at the time of our interview. The subsequent political change was enabled due to the persistent Oromo demonstration that started in April 2014 and was reignited after the

Addis Ababa (the capital)’s masterplan expanded to incorporate land from the Oromia region (BBC, 2016b). As Oromo activists had been at the epicenter of the sustained demonstrations that brought the current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, to the helm of power, many of my participants were activists and media personnel with major roles during the long resistance. Participants included Tsedale Lemma, the German-based chief editor of the English publication Addis Standard, regarded as the most credible outlet in

English in Ethiopia. Others included Zecharias Zelalem, a prominent Canada-based freelance journalist and Oromo activist, and other very vocal social media activists such as Ayantu Ayana and Fatuma Bedhaso from the Oromos. Although I was unable to reach

Jawar Mohammed, the Minnesota-based activist who is credited with leading the Oromo

protest, mainly using social media, I interviewed others who worked closely with him and were at the forefront of the protest.

Analyzing Through the Lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

In addition to interviewing social media activists, I studied the most popular social media sites in each country using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is mainly concerned with power relationships and the use of language in power dynamics.

Norman Fairclough’s Discourse and social change (1992) is among the central texts that consolidates CDA. Fairclough lays the blueprint for CDA and provides three critical frameworks. The first dimension is discourse-as-text, which is largely concerned with patterns of words, grammar, vocabulary, and structure. Media, naturally, have the greatest influence in creating such language discourse.

Fairclough’s second dimension is discourse-as-discursive. This dimension is concerned with how specific expressions and words are produced, circulated, and reproduced, without critically analyzing their usage. CDA pays more attention to the use of language, discourse, and speech in the social structure. Fairclough, however, notes that the discourse patterns must be situated in the greater structure of power and hegemony.

He adds that language itself cannot operate without a proper understanding of the concurrent structures that aim to critique and de-center.

Using Fairclough’s frame, I studied how social media activists challenge the state narratives that are disseminated through various organs. Social media sites by their own nature challenge the established discursive state/corporate power. In such competitive

space, social media activists use their decentralized outlets to challenge, de-center, and counter the top-down approach institutionalized by repressive regimes.

CDA endeavors to disentangle the discursive power through different stages of referential (naming) strategies, predictational (description) strategies, and argumentation strategies. Hence, I studied the most popular social media sites of the three countries in order to examine and understand how social media activists challenge and later counter the state-postulated one-dimensional narrative. CDA helped me look broadly at how the most autocratic leaders of the countries are framed in the social media discourse, the language social media activists commonly use to discredit the state narrative, and how they craft their messages to disarm the state messaging and at the same time empower their constituents.

Due to the closed nature of each country, social media activists do not have access to much information from inside their countries. Yet, they manage to counter the state’s narrative both locally and internationally with what limited information they have. Part of their strategy is to counter and disrupt. Using CDA approach, I examined how many social media activists disrupt the narratives, official statements, and communiques of each state. In doing so, I studied social media campaigns in each country at a given period, using hashtags.

Ethical Considerations During Data Collection, Processing, and Analysis

Guiding theme: As the overall aim of the research is to document, share and eventually return knowledge to the community that produces it, I have tried my best to

ensure that such experience will positively contribute to the people of the countries under research. More than extracting data from the participants who have sacrificed a lot and continue to work under difficult situations, I made sure that their experiences are well documented and will help the future generations who must deal with autocratic regimes.

Interview procedure: Before starting to collect my data, I received approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Ohio University. During the whole process of identifying participants, and undertaking interviews, transcription and data storage, I strictly followed the protocols. I made sure that I properly explained the aim of my research and the participants were comfortable with providing recorded interviews. I assured them that they could withdraw any moment from the interview if they became stressed or changed their mind for whatever reasons. In the IRB protocol, I emphasized that my research subjects would not face reprisals. Only those who have been very vocal critics using their real identities are mentioned by name. For the majority of the participants at the forefront of the struggle for change, not mentioning their real names would be a disservice to their contributions. I also made sure they are okay with being mentioned by name. For a few participants, for whom I thought that mentioning their real identity would not add anything of importance, however, I did change their names.

Transcription: Except for one of them, all of the interviews were conducted via

Skype. With the consent of the participants, I recorded all the interviews and later used

Temi, the speech to text transcription software, to transcribe the entire record. The software (which charges per minute) is very accurate but certainly results in errors,

especially if speakers have an accent or background noise occurs during the interview. As

English is the second language for most of the participants and most names are foreign to the software, I made sure to check the record and correct any flaws. Only after having the full and accurate transcriptions of all the interviews did I start my analysis. Of the 29 interviews I conducted, one was in Tigrinya while the rest were in English.

Reporting and analysis: After having the full and accurate transcription of each interview, I started my analysis. I made sure I remained faithful to their words. In doing so, I repeatedly referred to the audio record and the transcription.

Credibility: As my chosen process mostly emanated from the personal experiences of the social activists, counter-checking the claims, particularly personal experience, was the least of my concerns. Although I did not seek to collect empirical data, as participants might exaggerate certain claims or polish it in retrospect, whenever I suspected this might be happening, I tried to find some middle ground by asking other participants about the information in question. Although I can never have the same access and insight as natives (in the case of Ethiopia and Sudan), the fact that I am familiar with the geo-politics of the three countries and closely follow developments there enabled me to create a balance. This privileged me with an inside-out perspective. If the claims seem to be exaggerated, I also asked for available resources so that I could return and check it myself. Frequently, the interview sessions were followed by back and forth exchanges to share materials mentioned during the interview. Such enquiry helped me discern some claims or enrich my perspective on the subject.

Political Developments on Each Country During Data Collection

When I established my dissertation committee and proposed my topic, I planned to study the use of social media in challenging state repression in Cameroon, Eritrea,

Ethiopia, and Sudan. Apart from my immediate concern with Eritrea, I selected the other three countries for their terrible track records on media freedom.

Despite many differences between the three countries, Cameroon was initially included for its repressive media. During my proposal defense, however, my committee suggested that I drop Cameroon as it differs substantially from the three other countries for many reasons. Therefore, I excluded Cameroon.

While I was working on my proposal, political change took place in Ethiopia that forced Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn to resign amid a political crackdown and growing unrest. In April 2018, Abiy Ahmed became prime minister. Ahmed is from the

Oromo ethnic group, which while comprising the majority in Ethiopia never assumed such leadership in the country’s modern history. Ahmed introduced dramatic reforms such as the release of thousands of political prisoners, freeing journalists and activists whom his predecessors had incarcerated on trumped-up charges. After long years of repression, independent media were allowed to flourish. The sustained Oromo protests that has been coordinated and facilitated through social media finally bore fruits. Ahmed then extended an olive tree to Ethiopia’s long-time foe, the neighboring Eritrea. The two countries signed a historic peace deal in July 2018 ending a 20-year deadlock. Ethiopia’s

Ahmed subsequently was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize for brokering the peace.

The initial promising signs in Ethiopia and the well-hyped peace deal with

Eritrea, however, did not live up to the positive billing for very long. Soon Ethiopia devolved into a series of internal conflicts that left millions of Ethiopians internally displaced. Ethnic tensions between the federal states reached a new peak (Tesfaye, 2020).

Social media that had been widely credited for facilitating changes in Ethiopia (Al

Jazeera, 2018b) reportedly are now being used for the opposite purpose. My dissertation was intended to invigorate the shifting roles of social media. The time frame of my research would cover the pre-2018 changes and shed light on the developments that followed the overly hyped changes.

Having used the long unresolved border conflict with Ethiopia as the main excuse for all its internal repression, Eritrean authorities ran short of excuses to not follow their neighbor’s example and introduce change. Instead, internal conditions further deteriorated in Eritrea. The brief opening of the borders with Ethiopia allowed many

Eritreans to flee as they quickly detected the reluctance of their government to introduce positive changes. According to Human Rights Watch (2019a), about 164,000 Eritreans were living in Ethiopia at the time of the report. The new developments in Ethiopia resulted in some unforeseen effects and consequences in Eritrea. For example, the brief opening of the borders between the two countries has helped many Eritreans inside the country to debunk the narrative their government has long employed to justify repressive internal policies. The root causes of Eritreans’ exodus – including long outstanding issues such as indefinite military service, gross human rights abuses, lack of freedom of

expression, religious persecution, etc. – remained unaddressed. As waiting for meaningful change proved futile, many citizens started to take matters into their own hands. Eritrean social media activists gained enough momentum to pressure their government. As many became emboldened, social media served as the main facilitator for the ongoing demand for change.

Over the course of my dissertation, Sudan, like Ethiopia, has witnessed dramatic political change. A popular revolution that started in December 2018 over the cutting of basic subsidies eventually evolved into strong protests opposing Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which had been in power since 1989. Bashir was finally ousted in April 2019. In

August 2019, the Sudanese opposition coalition and the military council signed a power- sharing deal that is considered the first step toward forming a civilian government (Al

Jazeera, 2019a). As Sudan is at this critical but promising juncture because the current government has inherited an indebted country.

Data for the dissertation have been collected during these aforementioned crucial times of transition. While this project may not necessarily show how each shift will transpire into lasting change, it still provides a unique perspective in documenting the actual transition. With Ethiopia’s well-hyped transition taking a different course since early 2020, the ongoing developments are beyond the scope of the dissertation. I would rather focus on how social media has facilitated change in challenging the EPRDF party and briefly mention how social media began to function in an opposite role after the change.

Challenges During Research and How I Overcame them

It would be a big omission for me not to acknowledge some of the challenges I faced during my research work. In hopes that my experience can benefit future researchers working on similar topics, I will discuss some of these challenges and how I managed to overcome them.

Unless I approached them through mutual friends or they already were familiar with my work, many selected interview subjects were reluctant to give interviews. Such hesitation emanated from different reasons, including that their activism consumes all of their time. Once their energy is drained by their primary focus, they lack the time and motivation to speak to a researcher, as compared, say, to a media outlet that can help their activism. Other reasons could be the perception of “how do I benefit from this research?”

A lack of trust and reluctance to share their internal working relationships or reveal their tactics to a researcher were also other reasons social media activists might be hesitant to cooperate. In an extremely polarizing environment, some I assume might have mistrusted my motives.

Over the course of my research, I came up with a subtle way of dealing with the hesitations of many participants. Having noted a clear rejection or failure to reply to my email/messages at an early stage, I realized that I couldn’t overcome their reluctance without an interlocutor. Isma’il Kushkush, of whom I had prior knowledge and had interviewed him for my research, was one of my interlocutors for Sudan. I had been in touch with Kushkush since sometime around 2016 as he had been covering Eritrea.

During my research, not only did he connect me with participants, but he also suggested potential interviewees who could enrich my research. Magdi el-Gizouli was another point of contact among the Sudanese participants. El-Gizouli writes for the StillSudan blog, and I had been following him since 2014. The blog has served as my most helpful reference on Sudanese affairs for a long time. Since then, we have been in contact, and in

December 2019, we wrote a joint opinion piece for Al Jazeera English. With Kushkush and el-Gizouli as connections, my research with the Sudanese activists became easier, as these two are among most established names in the Sudanese diaspora. My approach through them created confidence and trust among the participants as it automatically quelled any concerns about my political position.

Ayantu Ayana, an Ohio University alumnus and Oromo activist whom I have been in touch with since 2013, served as an interlocutor among the Ethiopian participants. She recommended some prominent activists and connected me with many.

Relatively speaking, I found it easier to access many of the Ethiopian activists, as we had been in touch prior to the project due to the proximity of our relative struggles.

Participants were widely dispersed including in Australia, where there’s a huge time difference. Finding a time that worked best for the participants was a challenge. In order to pick the best time for my informant/participants, I had to make my own sacrifices, sometimes waking up around 3 or 4 a.m. local time in order to work with their time frame.

Due to the geographical disparities, except for Kuskush whom I interviewed in

November 2019 when he came to Athens to give a talk, I conducted the rest of the interviews via Skype. For various reasons, many activists these days do not use Skype very often or at all, and as a result many would forget their passwords. I opted for Skype rather than regular phone calls or WhatsApp because the other methods wouldn’t allow recording. This did create an inconvenience for many participants. Although I would tell them that we’d be using Skype, many had arranged a time for an interview, forgetting they needed Skype. As a result, we were forced to reschedule the interviews. Later I would very much highlight that we would be using Skype and ask them ahead of time to send me their Skype ID.

Chapter 3: Findings and Discussions

In the following chapters, I will discuss my findings on how (diaspora) social media activists have been using different alternative platforms to challenge their repressive states from outside. First, I will devote a separate chapter to each country. In the concluding chapter, I will use comparative analysis to reveal the similarities and differences (if any). The concluding chapter will sum up how social media activists have been exerting pressure vis-à-vis each state’s response. The final comparative section will help me draw similarities among the three countries.

Eritrean Exiled Social Media Challenges the State Hegemony

Discussing the use of social media in Eritrea, the least connected country in the world (other than North Korea) with 8% penetration rate (Internet world stats, 2020) might sound bizarre to a casual observer. As it can seem tantamount to studying social media without the internet, it is important that I first discuss the internet landscape in

Eritrea.

Eritrean exiles employing social media are mainly credited with challenging the state hegemony. Hence, my findings provide a closer analysis of the gradual process that transpired as a power shift. The chapter begins with discussing the concurrent mechanisms with which the Eritrean government has controlled the population inside the country and to a great extent the diaspora community. Then it will delve deeper into how the huge Eritrean diaspora community has been looking for nonviolent ways to challenge

the state from afar. Long before the invention of Facebook and other social media platforms such as Twitter, my findings start with the use of Paltalk.

The subsequent sections will deal with how the Eritrean diaspora – as the most reliable platform – countered the state domination of the thinking and free space outside the Eritrean territories. It will examine the different mechanisms that exiled activists utilize with social media in challenging the state, with few resources and an acute lack of information. As the findings reveal, slowly but surely the different initiatives have helped to alter the narrative and conquer the deeply ingrained fear-based loyalty that still exists among the huge Eritrean diaspora. The chapter will then try to shed light on how the shifting of power among the Eritrean diaspora has trickled down to the nationals inside the country.

Eritrea: The State, Transnational Identity, and Dual Roles

Eritrea presents an unusual case in the degree with which the state’s control extends beyond the nation’s territorial boundaries. Eritrea is ruled without a constitution and never conducted national elections under the current President Isaias Afwerki, in power since the country’s independence (1993). Under him, the country closed all avenues of expression and dissent inside the country. With all independent media, civic society and NGOs effectively banned (Tronvoll & Mekonnen 2014; Connell 2005) the state has managed to quell transnational opposition through other ways.

Victoria Bernal, who has extensively studied the Eritrean online-sphere, describes the state’s reaction to any forms of dissent: “Citizens are disempowered from voicing

their interests as unilaterally defined by the state. In this relationship, to demand something from the state is tantamount to disloyalty, because the state is supposedly serving the common good and ensuring Eritrea’s survival as a nation.” Thus, questioning the state’s policies could be equated to questioning the leaders’ ability to lead, which amounts to betraying the country (2014, p. 39).

As all mechanisms of expressing dissent or even differing opinions toward the state’s policies had been banned, Bernal (2014) states, “[A] public sphere where Eritreans could express, and develop their critiques, and mobilize themselves independently of the state could only exist outside Eritrea’s national borders” (p. 104). However, criticizing the state even in exile was not easy either for different intertwined factors.

Eritreans comprise one of the world’s biggest diaspora communities when seen proportionally to the size of the country and its population. With mass exodus still taking place, an estimated one-third to half of the total population lives outside the national borders. While a significant number of them live in neighboring countries such as Sudan,

Ethiopia, and recently in Uganda, many have resettled in Europe, America, Australia, and the Middle East (Hirt & Mohammad, 2018; Bernal, 2014).

The state practices various coercive and luring mechanisms to silence the exiles from voicing their opinions. This is rooted in the long struggle for liberation (1961-1991) with instruments used by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the front that led to independence. EPLF used to recruit Eritrean refugees and exiles as transnational mass organizations. Although this has been applied across the major Eritrean hubs, as Tricia

Hepner in her book Soldiers, martyrs, traitors and exiles (2009) broadly discusses, the

Front successfully controlled and micromanaged diaspora activities through various organs in the USA. They were very effective in mobilizing, collecting funds, and at times intimidating dissidents. After the country’s independence, as Hepner documents, these communities were replaced by organs of the ruling party (People’s Front for Democracy and Justice [PFDJ])’s. They became more resourceful under the supervision of the

Eritrean embassies and consular offices.

With this structure in place, the Eritrean state devised different mechanisms to silence the huge diaspora community. One way of legitimizing control was through the diaspora 2% income tax, which initially was justified as a way to rebuild the war-torn country after independence. The 2% tax is paid retroactively from 1992. In order to obtain any state services such as birth certificates, passport renewal, open business in the country, and even sending bodies for burial in Eritrea (which is very common among

Eritreans), etc., Eritreans in the diaspora (even those with dual citizenship) needed clearance and proof of paying the 2% income tax (Kibreab, 2007; Hirt, 2015). This was instrumental in instilling a fear-based loyalty. In a very closely knitted community like the Eritrean diaspora, the consular offices’ role was reduced to observing the sentiments of their constituents. As a result, many Eritreans in the diaspora were forced to keep silent to avoid developing a negative relationship with the consular office and risk losing basic services. Particularly for Eritreans who live in the Middle East, as those countries do not grant political asylum, nationals solely depended on the Eritrean passport and

hence needed to pay their 2% tax diligently (Hirt & Mohammad 2018, p. 240). For them, any conspicuous criticism of the government was out of bounds.

As Conrad (2012) contends, the Eritrean regime has strong relations with the

Eritrean diaspora through long-established transnational identity. During the long struggle for independence and later during the border war between neighboring Ethiopia

(1998-2000), the contribution of the Eritrean diaspora both in finances and other means such as lobbying was huge. For hardcore supporters of the regime, the state, people and the leadership forge a “holistic” notion and become synonymous. In Conrad’s words, criticism of the government is considered as challenging the holy trinity that if undermined would lead to the collapse of the system (p.169). Among supporters, anyone who criticizes the government is automatically labeled as a “CIA agent,” “traitor,”

“West’s stooge,” “anti-Eritrean,” etc.

The Eritrean government’s internal ruling mechanisms mirrors the diaspora community. Most branches of the government are dysfunctional and hence everything is micro-managed. Tronvoll (cited in Bernal, 2014, p. 38) notes that the chain of command runs from the country’s president down to the smallest administrative unit, the village. As

Tronvoll adds, accountability is vertical to the higher hierarchy and not the constituency

(2009, p.59). Hence, one way or another, the Eritrean diaspora is organized in such a strict top-down approach. The ruling party, which succeeded in shaping the organizational structures of the diaspora (Conrad, 2010, p. 176) intervenes in all social, religious, and economic affairs of the diaspora community. With a military-style, strict

top-down chain of command, all activities and most individuals are minutely observed.

Any deviation from the prescribed boundaries is countered with serious repercussions.

The Eritrean government heavily invests in keeping diaspora supporters close.

State officials conduct seminars accompanied by cultural shows in yearly diaspora festivals organized by the Eritrean consular offices and the ruling party. The state media heavily invests in programs tailored for the Eritrean diaspora while many semi- independent websites (linked with the ruling party) propagate the state’s policies, refuting any criticism that might harm the administration's image (Hirt & Mohammad, 2018;

Hepner, 2009, p. 124). As the PFDJ party had long enjoyed complete domination of the diaspora public spaces, until sometime around 2018, it was nearly impossible to conduct any Eritrean festivals not approved by the ruling party in Eritrea or the embassies in respective countries. A widely practiced tactic has been to disrupt events using hooligans to intimidate participants and occasionally threaten organizers or host countries if they are on friendly terms with the Eritrean state.

Retaliation by the state against family members at home has been another instrument employed to coerce the Eritrean diaspora from voicing out loud their criticisms against the state’s policies. In 2005, the state introduced hefty fines against families whose sons and daughters had fled the country. The state fined in the amount of

50,000 Nakfa ($3,333) for a single deserter (Bozzini, 2015, p.43). Added to the fines was the psychological guilt of those who fled the country if family members at home were

ostracized and penalized by their respective administrative districts. Eritrean families bought their basic needs using coupons from the ruling party stores. Falling out of grace with administrative districts could be costly. After reaching their final destinations, the new arrivals typically are met by interpreters in the asylum offices and communities. The majority came from an earlier generation of Eritrean immigrants who still had strong ties with the government in Eritrea. They persuade the newcomers to concentrate on their livelihoods and avoid all politics.

Occasionally the state would go beyond imposing financial fines. Family members of senior government officials could pay dearly if the official fell out of grace with the leadership. For example, Petros Solomon, who was minister of foreign affairs, defense, and fishers at different times, was among the leading senior government officials who challenged the president to implement the ratified constitution and introduce reforms. This provoked a major political crackdown in which the president and his group jailed 11 of the senior officials, who have remained in incommunicado detention since

September 18, 2001 (Connell, 2005). Solomon’s wife Aster Yohannes was studying in

U.S.A. at that time. When she returned to Eritrea after completing her studies to be with her children, she was picked up at the airport by security personnel in December 2003 and has been held in prison ever since without due process of law. Similarly, when former information minister Ali Abdu Ahmed abandoned the regime and sought political asylum in Australia in 2012, his daughter Ciham Ali Ahmed was caught while attempting

to cross the border to Sudan. She was 15 at the time and remains in unknown detention

(Amnesty International 2019; Human Rights Watch 2019b).

Despite such interference, there was one crucial area that the state did not manage to influence or control. The formation of Eritrean online space was vital for many reasons. As a way of creating a platform for discussions and raising awareness among the diaspora, Eritreans, particularly those living in the U.S.A., introduced online platforms.

Eritrean tech experts created an online discussion form, called Dehai (meaning news in

Tigrinya) in the early 1990s. Bernal states, in contrast to most of the organizational forms that have connected Eritreans in diaspora to each other and to national institutions, the websites were established independently rather than under the leadership in Eritrea.”

(Bernal, 2014, p.20). Following the first online forum, other independent websites such as Asmarino.com and Awate.com were launched by Eritreans living in the U.S.A. As

Bernal documents in her book, initially the websites’ tone did not differ significantly from the state’s approach. Rather, they amplified the state’s policies. After the 2001 political crackdown that resulted in the ban of private newspapers and incarceration of journalists and senior state officials, however, the websites started to drift away. In the absence of independent media and opposition political parties inside the country, Bernal stipulates, “The Websites have come to serve as offshore platforms for civil society and a surrogate public sphere independent of the state, where a diversity of views, and particularly dissent views, can be expressed and accessed” (2014, p.21).

Outlaying the political sphere of the Eritrean diaspora is important as a backdrop.

As the subsequent sections will show, only in the broader socio-political context can someone have a better grasp of the role that social media have played in challenging the state. My findings will attempt to demonstrate how social media have been instrumental in pushing the boundaries against all the difficulties briefly summarized above.

Paltalk: From a Dating App to a Tool of Political Mobilization

Paltalk, a free online chat room, allows participants to communicate via voice, video, and text chats in real-time. Discussions can also be recorded and played back.

Paltalk as a political platform subsequently gained popularity in the most repressive countries and among the diaspora communities of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia

(Mohamed, 2015; Tekle, 2011). Paltalk provided a notable advantage to the diaspora

Eritreans as opposed to other outlets. Fear has been institutionalized among the Eritrean exiles due to the aforementioned retaliatory measures. The fact that Paltalk not only allows but encourages anonymity and using fake ID created a fertile ground for many

Eritreans to speak out.

Gradually, Eritrean activists started opening Paltalk rooms for political discussion. Apart from the few notable websites, the lack of civil society and the dearth of independent media, the ever-growing Eritrean diaspora community was in desperate need of public forums. Hence, Paltalk turned into a convenient medium to openly discuss matters of serious public concern. A notable development at this juncture was the formation of the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights (EMHDR) in

2003/4. EMHDR was established by about 600 Eritreans who were sent on government scholarships for higher education in South Africa, mostly in 2001. The founding chair of

EMHDR Daniel Mekonnen, a human rights lawyer and chair of Eritrean Law Society, states that sometime from 2003/4 until 2016, Paltalk has been the most efficient platform to organize, disseminate information, and call for action. Although Paltalk has been widely used as a dating app in other communities, according to Mekonnen, the diaspora communities from the Horn of Africa have successfully used the medium for political mobilization (D. Mekonnen, personal communication, Jan. 28th, 2020).

EMHDR was credited with changing the landscape of the Eritrean opposition.

Samuel Bizen, who served as chair of the movement between November 2004 until

December 2011, describes its major contribution for propelling the young and educated

Eritrean generation to the forefront with nonviolence mode of struggle. “It became a bridge between the old and new generation and most importantly initiated a significant departure from the old generation opposition forces that was characterized by ELF faction [majority members of Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) who left the field of armed struggle in early 1980s and many never returned to Eritrea after the country’s independence],” (S. Bizen, personal communication, Feb. 10, 2020).

Mekonnen had been spearheading various actions against the Eritrea state repression. He believes that before shifting to Facebook and other social media platforms such as Twitter, Paltalk was the most effective platform for organization, reaching the widely scattered Eritreans across different time zones. Different Paltalk rooms have been

founded and administered by Eritreans in the diaspora, where at times they held as many as 500 guests. This is not counting those who would listen to the recorded discussions.

One of the Paltalk rooms’ significant contributions, Mekonnen explains, is their diverse programs devoted to arts, the diaspora, social life, politics, and others. Thus, this made the Paltalk rooms the de-facto Eritrean media. One program that stood out as a noteworthy contribution was a weekly program called “Tezareb” (speak-out) where

Eritreans would share personal accounts of their suffering while in Eritrea. The program motivated many to share their stories and break the silence, while at the same time it documented some of the crimes of the perpetrators (D. Mekonnen, personal communication, Jan. 28th, 2020).

All the participants interviewed for this dissertation acknowledge Paltalk’s key contribution in various facades. The power of anonymity, although some recognize its downside in lacking accountability and checking the veracity of sources, motivated many to share their experiences. The fact that Eritrean opposition media are known for extensive use of pen names reflects the truth that many do not feel confident enough to reveal their identities. Paltalk thus opened a room not only for those who could articulate their views on writing, but many ordinary citizens. Some who presented their testimonies in Paltalk rooms included former prison guards and interrogators at some of the infamous military prison centers in Eritrea. As participants can ask questions directly to the speakers in a session, this adds credibility. The participatory nature of the platform and real-time discussions established proximity that helped many people to take a bold stand

against the long-instilled fear. As interviewees attest, this has created a new tradition in the Eritrean political sphere.

Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean refugee advocate, radio host, and human rights defender, singles out Paltalk for shifting the conversation from the old to the younger generation of opposition. Estefanos had moved back to Eritrea from Sweden in the early

2000’s with the intention of remaining in Eritrea. However, she changed her mind and returned to Sweden after she observed gross human rights abuses. The first thing that caught Estefanos’ interest among the Eritrean opposition was to see the young generation

– students in South Africa under their umbrella (EMHDR) – taking the lead. Estefanos later joined the movement. Since then, the young generation has started to take an active role. EMHDR started a radio program called Dimxi Delina (“We need Our Voice”) at the beginning of 2006. The open Paltalk sessions, in which young Eritreans could freely discuss their own affairs outside the state’s control and space, enabled many to conquer their inherent fear (M. Estefanos, personal communication, Dec. 17, 2019).

Mekonnen believes that Paltalk was the most effective social media tool in making calls for people to speak out, document testimonials, and organize public demonstrations linked with the U.N.'s Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in

Eritrea. The commission that was established to investigate Eritrean government’s crimes released its first report in June 2015 and concluded: “The Government of Eritrea is responsible for systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations that have created a climate of fear in which dissent is stifled, a large proportion of the population is

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subjected to forced labor and imprisonment, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled the country,” adding that such repression has not been witnessed elsewhere both in scope and scale (U.N., 2015).

Mekonnen was a member and co-facilitator of a task force that was established by

Eritrean diaspora grassroots movements in different countries to collect testimonials for the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry. The calls to submit testimonials were made mainly through Paltalk room sessions. The commission investigated the archives of the previous sessions where many Eritreans shared firsthand accounts of their suffering at the hands of the regime. Mekonnen and his colleagues approached them to verify some claims, but mainly to submit their written testimonials or help them in writing and translate it to

English.

Following the release of a report of the U.N.'s Commission of Inquiry on Human

Rights in Eritrea, arguably the biggest turnout until then took place in Geneva,

Switzerland, in support of the commission, condemning human rights abuses in Eritrea.

Organizers estimated that about 5,000 Eritreans from countries in Europe, Canada and

North America participated in the demonstration. Mekonnen, who chaired the demonstration’s committee, called it “the first significant critical juncture” in the Eritrean diaspora opposition. All the preliminaries and groundwork had been facilitated through

Paltalk (D. Mekonnen, personal communication, Jan. 28, 2020).

The Eritrean government, however, does not recognize any Eritrean opposition.

The state media maintains the impression that every Eritrean diaspora supports the state’s

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policies. The huge Geneva turnout in support of the report of the commission of inquiry was momentous in puncturing the state narrative. It encouraged the silent majority to take a stand and separate from the regime. Gradually, however, particularly after Facebook introduced a live video feature in 2016, Paltalk’s use among Eritrean activists has waned.

The Influence of Middle East and North African Popular Uprisings

Despite its failure to translate into meaningful political transformation, apart from in Tunisia, the great swath of uprisings in the MENA region has inspired Eritrean youth activists. Unlike the youth in the MENA countries, Eritrean activists are hindered by two crucial factors: 1) the lack of widespread internet penetration and smartphones among citizens inside the country; and 2) the regime’s lethal response to any public demonstration.

Eritrean Youth Solidarity for Change, a grassroots civic organization, was established following the changes in MENA. It started with a Facebook group page in

February 2011. The movement absorbed various youth-driven associations and networks across the U.S.A. and other countries. According to Daniel G. Mikael, co-founder and first chairman of the organization, the Facebook group quickly became a launching pad for the widely scattered Eritreans. For some years the group served as a medium to share information, create networks, and debate ideas as the Eritrean diaspora lacked independent public forums. “Although the successful removal of the dictatorship can only happen on the ground in Eritrea,” argues Mikael, “dictatorships thrive when they have the full control of what people should know and discuss. Hence, in pursuit of democracy,

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more participation in public discourse is crucial” (D. G. Mikael, personal communication, Oct. 24, 2016).

Others corroborate Mikael’s recognition of social media for creating independent thinking and discussion platforms. Zecarias Gerrima, a former state TV, Eri-TV journalist who left the country in 2014, is now program director of ERISAT, a diaspora-based independent TV station that broadcasts to Eritrea via satellite. Gerrima argues, in the absence of traditional media both inside and outside the country, social media has been the only way for Eritreans to reach one another. For the estimated half-million people who have left Eritrea in the last 10-15 years and are already aware of the reality on the ground, news information is inconsequential, reasons Gerrima. “What social media has been doing is creating space, the thinking space the way we perceive our reality rather than about collecting information.” With a sense of urgency, he believes the discussions have now matured (Z. Gerrima, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

Although getting timely updates on developments in the country might seem

“inconsequential,” as Gerrima states, for the many Eritreans leaving the country, those living inside the country were left out. There had been an initiative to connect Eritreans inside the country, however. Freedom Friday, inspired by the youth initiative of MENA, was established by Eritrean diaspora youth activists in November 2011. Named after the day Eritrea was liberated, the grassroots organization was established with the aim of bridging the information gap between the Eritrean diaspora and locals inside the country, amplifying the suffering of Eritrean nationals to the international community, and calling

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for civil disobedience without confronting the police state inside the country. According to the organization’s documents, in addition to distributing pamphlets and posters in public places in major cities in Eritrea, Freedom Friday employed mass robocalls both to influential and random citizens, encouraging them to take communal actions (Freedom

Friday, 2014).

Because of fear of possible reprisals, many Eritreans won’t risk their lives to stay at home heading the calls, but the organization’s actions create widespread awareness and brings the opposition close to home. The group has been very active on different Eritrean forums in the diaspora, but more importantly cell members inside the country have been able to document and share (both videos and photos) some of the gross abuses committed inside Eritrea and smuggle them out. It has been mainly through such posters and posts that the Eritrean diaspora have been able to access unsolicited and uncensored images of life inside the country. Freedom Friday, with segments in radio broadcasts that reach

Eritrea, easily connects with locals (M. Stefanos, personal communication, Dec. 17,

2019; T. Tewolde, personal communication, Nov. 20, 2016).

No matter how limited the outcomes, the roles of such disparate initiatives in shifting the narrative of Eritrean politics is worth noting. Such independent initiatives have contributed in demystifying the feared military state and its security apparatus. It brought the conversation home where average citizens began to take initiative and be encouraged to act.

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Eritrean Social Media as Public Sphere

The transformative and participatory nature of social media has opened new avenues outside the state’s territorial and extraterritorial spaces. As Eickelman and

Anderson (cited in Bernal, 2014, p. 9) state, the new public space is “discursive, performative, and participative, and not confined to formal institutions recognized by state authorities” (2003, p. 2).

Even during the so-called peak of the Eritrean independent press (1998-2001), there weren’t many public platforms where Eritreans could freely share their thoughts, question the official discourse, or provide an alternate narrative. Among the widely scattered Eritrean diaspora and recent exiles, social media with all its limitations opened a new chapter where average men and women could openly discuss issues of great public concern outside the state’s territories.

Paltalk was the first social medium Eritreans used to gather and deliberate issues of major concern. The advent of Live Facebook has made such open discussion even more convenient. Many Eritreans in the diaspora have been taking the initiative to discuss issues, raise awareness, collect funds for distressed citizens, and call for collective actions.

Eritrean Live Facebook discussions tackle issues of concern both at home and in the diaspora community. Sometimes, when issues under debate are trendy, they have drawn more than 10,500 participants in the live audience (Seltene Girmay Tefetawi

Show, 2020). While such debates are conducted by moderators, the audience participates

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by writing comments or questions, which the moderators ask the guests or even give them a chance to ask questions themselves. These debates are organic in that they raise issues outside the state narratives or might even challenge the popular perception among the opposition. Issues considered as too sensitive and politically volatile to be handled by civic society and state organs are freely debated. Not all issues debated and discussed on such forums directly deal with the political repression in Eritrea, but they challenge the mainstream narrative from both sides and bring new perspectives.

Semhar Ghebreslassie fled Eritrea in December 2014 and currently lives in

Sweden. She is among the most vocal social media activists, and extensively uses Live

Facebook to discuss timely issues. Ghebreslassie has been taking the lead role in organizing public meetings, collecting money for demonstrations and other causes, mainly using Facebook. Social media activism takes a significant portion of her time, which sometimes can extend up to 18 hours per day. Her Facebook Live discussions aggregate between 500 and 1,000 followers. Recorded files may reach up to 60,000 views. Both in terms of engagement and outcome, this has been encouraging for

Ghebreslassie. In a Facebook Live fundraising event for demonstration against the dashed peace deal with the neighboring Ethiopia, Ghebreslassie and her colleagues raised more than $27,000 on a single night (S. Ghebreslassie, personal communication, Nov. 19,

2019).

Ghebreslassie argues that the entire system in Eritrea has been designed to silence the slightest deviating opinion. In a militaristic style of top-down command that trickles

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down to schools, Ghebreslassie believes Eritreans never have had the opportunity to communicate horizontally and discuss their affairs without fear of retribution. “Social media is now helping them open up and speak out.” She compares the social media- inspired trend with how babies learn to speak and use words. As most of the social media discussions have been amplified by the satellite media that reach Eritrea, the new trend poses a serious challenge to an Eritrean government that has long dominated the public platforms. “Despite the gross abuses and dire situations in the country, Eritreans were forced to stand the repression because they were made to believe there is no better option available for them except living with what they had been conditioned to. Now they have a little window to witness the wide support from outside that amplifies their pain instead of the regular state propaganda. I believe this would trigger many to take matters at hand and challenge the regime,” explains Ghebreslassie (S. Ghebreslassie, personal communication, Nov. 19, 2019).

Other activists validate Ghebreslassie’s line of thought. The former state TV journalist and now program director of the diaspora-based opposition satellite TV,

ERISAT, Gerrima argues that social media have enabled a fresh way of looking at things as opposed to the state-centered media. Although it has been a slow process, the discussions have matured and “people are coming to common consensus. The heterogeneous voices and the decade long gestation are finally getting crystalized. There seems to be a sense of urgency now for change to happen in Eritrea” (Z. Gerrima,

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personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019). Gerrima’s framing of Eritrean social media as a means of building consensus resonates with public sphere theory.

Building consensus is one important aspect of Habermas’ public sphere theory.

More than disseminating reliable information, the function of the public sphere was to form public opinion based on informed deliberations. Habermas stresses the importance of vital public spheres that reflect the pluralistic views of multiple layers of society and interest groups. The Eritrean social media on a small scale has enabled such deliberation.

For the diaspora-born second generation of Eritreans, social media has been the new platform on which to reinvigorate and question what they grew up believing. Many of them came from families with strong ties to the ruling party (PFDJ). That party heavily invests in the second generation of Eritreans in the diaspora and inculcates “narratives of heroism and victimhood” (Graf, 2018, p. 119). The second generation of Eritreans, “who grew up in strong PFDJ family culture” as she describes them, are among the prime targets of Swedish-Eritrean Venessa Tsehaye. As with all diaspora movements, since

Eritrean activism lacks local community-based grassroots organizations, Tsehaye said she uses the available social media platforms to reach wider international allies and connect with the “desperate second generation of Eritreans who have been left out in the conversation.” The social media hashtags, according to Tsehaye, have helped many with similar grievances to connect and formulate virtual communities that can start to mobilize and organize on the ground. “The diaspora born Eritreans, if properly informed and engaged, have huge potential. Many of them are college educated, with great skills, and

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wider connections. I am trying to mainly reach them out as I feel no one ever had engaged them and mined their potential,” reasons Tsehaye. “If so, I believe they are big resource in putting active pressure on the Eritrean government” (V. Tsehaye, personal communication, Nov. 16, 2019).

Eritrean diaspora social media are not of course unilateral in their messages and targets. The sudden availability of free platforms has enabled populist and “far-right” activists to flare up. The “Agazian” (meaning “emancipatory” in Ge’ez) movement seeks to unite the Tigrinya speakers of the Tigray region of Ethiopia and Eritrea and establish an Orthodox Christian nation. The movement started with Live Facebook (and YouTube) discussions and posts by the founder, an exiled Eritrean based in the U.K. Although the main activities of the movement are now carried out by different social media platforms, it quickly gained widespread traction and opened many chapters in different countries.

This radical far-right movement advocates for creating internment camps for Muslims and other minorities (Yeguda, 2018). The populist rhetoric of the movement’s leader, which were made available to the freely available social media platforms, mainly

Facebook Live, attracted huge numbers of destitute Eritrean refugees.

The research participants and field research confirm that Eritrean social media have facilitated citizens’ departure from the influence of state institutions. They evolved as an organic public sphere where nationals – assisted with Live Facebook discussions, crowdfunding and other resources – have overtaken the state’s role. Such initiative is not limited to pressuring the government. At times of community crisis such as when Eritrean

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refugees suffer under smugglers or are held in custody in Libya, or assistance is needed for refugees in neighboring countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, Eritreans have used social media to seek help, raise awareness, and collect funds. Prior to that, such tasks were carried out by PFDJ and the Eritrean embassy that “were encouraged to play the leadership roles and help facilitate individuals’ relationship with the state by mediating official embassy business, planning events for national holidays, and distributing videos, tapes, and CDs that proved immensely popular as well as profitable,”

(Hepner, 2014, p. 124).

Social Media without Internet: Reaching out Eritreans Inside the Country

Eritrea has one of the lowest internet penetrations in the world at about 8% according to Internet World Stats (2020). It has been described as “the least technologically connected country on Earth,” (Winter, 2014). The low penetration rate and lack of modern equipment are further exacerbated by extreme centralization. The state-owned telecommunication company, Eri-Tel, is the sole internet service provider.

This makes it easier for the government to control or ban certain unwanted sites. Users are often asked to provide ID in internet cafes, where the majority access the web. There is no mobile data, and having an internet connection at home is expensive, costing four times the monthly salary of a first-degree holder with a fixed salary scale.

Amid growing information leaks from inside the country particularly after the

July 2018 peace deal with Ethiopia, the Eritrean government took further steps to curb even minimum communication with the outside world. By May 2019, most social media

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messaging apps had been blocked. Since then, in what seems to be a normalized trend, nationals have resorted to VPN to circumvent the ban (BBC, 2019).

The frequently asked question is whether social media engagements in the diaspora reach nationals inside the country. Eritreans who have left the country over the last four to five years or others who travel out of the country for events say that despite the slow connection, many people inside the country have been able to follow the discussions and campaigns outside of Eritrea.

Habteab Yemane, the former final appellate judge at the Eritrean Supreme Court

(High Court) who fled the country in 2016 and now lives in Switzerland, reveals that many Eritreans inside the country easily circumvent censorship. Both for banned books which are smuggled in and other documents worth reading, Yemane cited the various networks citizens have built over the long years of isolation. Members of such decentralized and loose networks diligently search materials to share and discuss within cells. Online articles and audio files are sometimes downloaded by contacts who have faster connections either in U.N. or consular offices. Such materials are avidly consumed by readers eagerly awaiting any smuggled material. Most file-sharing processes are carried out using USB disks, which most Eritreans possess (H. Yemane, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

If unable to keep up with instant updates, activists from the diaspora believe that the discussions outside the country quickly reach home. ERISAT program director

Gerrima argues that personal connections work more efficiently than modern

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technological tools. As the huge number of Eritreans outside their country maintain connections with their friends and families at home, information is easily shared in both directions. Gerrima attributes this to the long-established tradition in Eritrea: “People don't collect their information from the media as there is no media as such. It is primarily through the words of mouth.” He elaborates that in most closed societies like Eritrea, information flow does not follow conventional methods. Circumstances both inside the country and in the diaspora communities have created new ways, and as a result information flows in drastically unconventional (ways) (Z. Gerrima, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

All the research participants interviewed cited the Ethio-Eritrean peace-deal and the brief opening of the borders as having altered the dynamics and opened the eyes of many in Eritrea. Nationals from the two countries were finally able to move freely between the two for a few months. Restoring telephone communication made it much easier for information to enter and leave the country. As many Eritreans are living in the neighboring countries, it became easier to access information from the country and communicate with people there.

Though unable to access information freely from online as a result of the lack of internet and other aforementioned issues, fortunately, traditional media have improved their reach to Eritrea. Since the end of 2018, in addition to the radio stations that have been broadcasting since 2009 via satellites and short wave, the emergence of two satellite

TV stations has been a game changer. An inbuilt structure has aided the penetration of the

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satellite radio and TV stations. Citing a 2017 national survey (which has never been made public), Eritrean Minister of Information Mr. Yemane G. Meskel stated in September

2019, “91% of households in Eritrea's cities & towns possess satellite dishes” (Meskel,

2019a). The widespread possession of satellite dishes in most Eritrean households inside the country has made this easier. The launching of Eritrean diaspora TV, operated and edited by former state journalists, has bridged the information gap. Gerrima explores the reasons behind the huge following of the diaspora TV stations:

People are following us, I think, not because of what we say but it was more of

the sense of change, how these new TV stations seem to symbolize a change in a

way that people had never thought of. Nobody would have ever imagined a TV

station being broadcast to Eritrea a few years ago. So, people just started

following us for the novelty of the idea. It was unusual to have a TV station that

openly talks against the government for 24 hours a day. This is the first time in

the nation’s history where citizens inside the country can freely watch something

that is not owned by the central government.

A significant portion of the TV station’s airtime is filled with social media posts, such as YouTube recordings and Live Facebook discussions. One of the drives behind launching the publicly funded TV station, ERISAT, according to Gerrima, was to serve as platform between “the different voices in the diaspora and from within the country and then deliver it back to the people, especially those inside the country.” The TV station being publicly funded and run by volunteers has created a sense of belonging among

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many nationals. About half of the contents are being produced by average people and don’t necessarily meet the standard of quality for TV production. This, however, has the advantage of making it sound like true citizen TV. It is probably because of this, at least partly, Gerrima acknowledges, that nationals from inside the country send the station video clips to be aired, despite their poor quality (Z. Gerrima, personal communication,

Nov. 17, 2019).

For better or worse, only through social media can information from inside the country leak out. Samuel Tsegai is a doctoral student of history at Queens University of

Canada who has been spearheading social media campaigns on Eritrea. Before leaving the country on scholarship in 2015, he was involved with producing an underground newsletter that had been circulating online in the diaspora and via the usual channels of

USB disks inside the country. With all its challenges, Tsegai agrees that social media has been the sole lifeline to access information from inside the country: “Any information that we get, any information that the government wants to contain, be it half-fact, half- fictionalized information that we have been getting, is mainly through social media. I don't think there is any other channel where people can communicate any information from inside except through social media” (S. Tsegai, personal communication, Dec. 7,

2019).

Information that portrays the actual state of the country is mostly shared through social media. Materials shared through social media might not contain empirical facts or disclose crucial information behind certain decisions. Rather, they are screenshots of

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public notices, wall graffiti that discredits the government, obituary news from public notice boards (as that is the tradition in Eritrean cities and towns), or snippets of video from particular noteworthy incidents. Such posts are photographed and sent to contacts to the diaspora, where they eventually are widely shared and discussed among the diaspora community.

For others, such as the Swedish-Eritrean Vanessa Tsehaye, there is little activists can do about the lack of information. Within that limited access, however, she believes activists can maximize the use of the available platforms to puncture the dread silence.

Tsehaye, who began activism at the age of 16, is one of the most vocal activists. She had appeared at big events and spoke at the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Oslo

Freedom Forum, and been featured on global media outlets such as CNN, Democracy

Now, BBC, Al Jazeera, and others. “Since we can’t get accurate information from the most secretive government in Eritrea,” argues Tsehaye, “what we can do through social media is to pose the questions. Make the questions even relevant because as of now, these questions are not even being asked because of the censorship in the country. But we have the possibility to ask these questions not only on social media but then bringing them to larger platforms, whether they're online or offline platforms,” (V. Tsehaye, personal communication, Nov. 16, 2019).

Although social media might not be used to exchange information in real-time, as has been the case in most other situations, it still functions effectively, albeit slowly, in

Eritrea. It continues to deliver as a platform for independent discussions. In many ways, it

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also has functioned to help build consensus. With all the restrictions placed by the state, how activists have been filling the information gap is certainly worth discussion and examination.

Mechanisms of Challenging the State Propaganda and Information Control

Between 2018 and early 2020, I have studied the most popular social media platforms among the Eritrean diaspora. I have studied the posts and interactions through the prism of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA mainly focuses on the language as social practice that is used to legitimize, maintain, and normalize the power inequality.

How social media activists challenge the language of power and delegitimize oppression without adequate resources has been my focus.

The subsequent sections will attempt to demonstrate how social media activists – using different mechanisms – target and challenge the texts, speeches, and information produced by the state institutions. As Tsegai noted, the challenge is two-fold:

The Eritrean regime depends on effective and long sustained propaganda on

projecting a certain image of itself towards its constituency and foreign observers

who are interested in Eritrea. So, one basic task that a person who lives outside

Eritrea can perform is to puncture the narrative and the image the government

advances about itself. Social media activism especially done from outside Eritrea

has one task and that is to problematize and disrupt the narrative advanced by the

government. After disrupting the state narrative, then we can also advance

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alternative ideas; alternative history, alternative politics, and alternative opinions.

(S. Tsegai, personal communication, Dec. 7, 2019).

My findings reveal three ways of disrupting and challenging the state narrative, and at times even taking a proactive role. Three mechanisms for decentering the state narrative are using semi-open sources to fill the information gap, telling personal stories to counter the state narrative, and lastly, satirizing political figures to erode their status. In the coming sections, I will discuss each of these methods and demonstrate how effective each has been in challenging the state’s information monopoly.

Semi-open Source for Information Gathering

Through user-generated content, social media platforms have been touted as decentralized and alternative outlets to traditional media. In the absence of other means of generating, distributing, and promoting content, which in Eritrea are not viable options, alternate modes are a necessity. These “alternative” roles have been thrust into the mainstream.

The concept of public records does not exist in Eritrea. Accessing even supposedly non-controversial data becomes nearly impossible both inside the country and in the diaspora. This grave vacuum of information has been partly filled with the help of social media. It is common for researchers and journalists to post questions seeking information regarding specific incidents, which soon get substantiated via firsthand

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accounts. It could be argued this is the common tradition among social media users.

However, although among others could be to ask better tips or may stem from lack of access to certain resources. In the Eritrean context, this is the only way to bypass the information vacuum. For example, if I’m writing an article about some ongoing news development in Eritrea, since I know I won’t get accurate information from the Eritrean media, I post my question on social media. The response has been very encouraging.

Overcoming state surveillance and slow internet connections, nationals from inside the country can reach out to me and provide their firsthand account.

The semi-open source method is not limited to soliciting and receiving tips but also correcting inaccuracies and enriching a report. During my field research, I observed many social media activists countering state propaganda, using threads and posts on social media. These threads are typically enriched in real-time by people contributing additional information, verifying the accuracy of the information, providing references, and amplifying the message.

Listing Eritrea’s prison facilities – both official and underground – is one example of such semi-open source collaboration. Over the last two decades, underground prison centers, run by the security apparatus and military commanders, have grown exponentially in Eritrea. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for any independent entity to accurately count the number, locations and names of prisons or identify who runs them. Concerned nationals have asked Eritreans to list the names and locations of prison centers where they either have been held or know about due to direct sources. That

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call for information has produced a list of more than 360 prison centers across the country, the majority outside the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice and that are run/owned by military commanders who extort money for plea bargains (The Guardian,

2016; The New Internationalist, 2018).

Using Personal Narratives to Fill the Information Gap

Telling the personal stories of Eritreans of diverse backgrounds has been another way of overcoming the lack of information. This has been a new tradition in the Eritrean situation. Sharing personal stories to the public, however, is not necessarily an easy task.

As Karl Joachim Weintraub (1978) maintains, storytellers or writers can find it difficult to present ideas about themselves. What makes it harder, Weintraub states, is the discomfort they feel in revisiting the difficult moments in their lives when they were not able to maintain their dignity and resist state authority. In the case of Eritrea, this is even more pronounced. The fear of direct retaliation for speaking out or reprisals against family members in Eritrea is well-grounded. As the tradition of sharing personal stories either in writing or on other platforms is not common among Eritreans, those who have taken the initiative to tell their personal stories have overcome multiple restrictions and limitations.

Personal testimony, or in the case of abuses sharing individual stories, is considered as “voices of the voiceless.” As Abrahms (2010) stipulates, it provides a narrative to the “story-less and power to the marginalized” (p. 151), who otherwise won’t be heard. Either through the personal testimonies of the Paltalk sessions, Facebook Live

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discussions, tweets, or through photos, many Eritreans are growing more emboldened to share their stories.

As my field research documents, many personal stories have emerged to counter questionable claims by Eritrean state officials. Other times stories have been employed as a trigger to speak out and conquer fear. Some prominent social media campaigns have garnered coverage from mainstream international media such as CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera since early 2019 (CNN, 2019; Al Jazeera, 2019b; BBC, 2019). The #Yiakl (#Enough) campaign, which will be discussed separately, has encouraged many Eritreans to share their personal stories. As the campaign was handled in an ice-bucket challenge style, hundreds, if not thousands, of Eritreans in the diaspora were able to come forward to tell their personal stories.

Another social media campaign that made use of extensive personal stories and photographs to challenge the state narrative was #EndHighSchoolInSawa, which was launched in mid-2019. The last year of secondary school, when students sit for the secondary school leaving certificate examination, is taught at the Sawa military training center. In extremely unfavorable weather, minimal facilities and with basic rations, students are required to combine academic studies with military training. Students as young as 16, who are not supposed to be recruited in the military according to the national service proclamation, are required to attend the school. The

#EndHighSchoolInSawa social media campaign aimed to question and challenge the

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practice. The success of the campaign relied on personal stories and photos of former students of the school.

The campaign coincided with the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Sawa military training center. Eritrean state media had been excitedly trumpeting how the military academy had saved the nation from “invasion” and trained some of the country’s best men and women. Social media activists, with collaborators inside the country, began aggressively countering the state narrative. Many shared their personal stories, gloomy photos taken at the military training center, etc., providing a compelling contrast to the state media narrative’s impossibly grand version of the truth. As Sawa has been widely implicated with rape and sexual abuses, some young women shared their personal experiences of the assaults they endured in Sawa. In different cities in the West, the online campaign extended to actual physical gatherings where former students of the school told their personal stories. Those accounts were recorded and shared on social or independent media that reaches Eritrea.

Satirizing Power to Deconstruct the Perceived Images of the State Officials

Satire has been the third mechanism of resisting and dismantling the state hegemony by Eritrean social media activists. As Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) maintains, laughter is another form of resistance to power and deconstructing the established discourse. In today’s Eritrea, it is difficult, if not impossible, to publicly contradict the official state narrative. Although political humor is very common in Eritrea to subvert and challenge the official “truths,” traditional media provides no space for it.

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Satirizing political leaders indeed is a new tradition in Eritrean media. There are no late-night show comedians in the country. Not only parodying political elites but many other subjects are out of bound for jokes in public events. For example, the country’s most revered comedian, Ghirmay “Sandiego” Yohannes, cracked some jokes about the armed struggle in his stand-up shows while on tour in Uganda on New Year’s Eve 2019.

Uploaded on YouTube, his show went viral on social media. This triggered an alarm with

Eritrean state security as Yohannes reportedly had crossed the redline. Fearing that he might end up in prison if he returned to Eritrea, the comedian was forced to abscond (G.

Yohannes, personal communication, Oct. 20, 2019).

It is from such grim happenings that social media has opened doors. Satirizing the elites in power and the state initiatives has been one of the most common features of social media. The main target of the endless jabs, of course, is President Isaias Afwerki, who has been in power since the country’s independence in 1993. Supporters or independent observers have used his acronym PIA (for President Isaias Afwerki). The established name among the opposition is DIA (Dictator Isaias Afwerki).

A stark contrast exists between how the president is regarded in the state media and arts inside the country and his portrayal among the diaspora social media. As Müller has described, the whole establishment structure in Eritrea is focused on portraying the

“omnipotent president” (2012, p. 457). This grandiose portrayal of the president has been reinforced in many ways. The state media and the country’s art production have played a

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major role in achieving this. For example, in a song called “Adha” (meaning boisterous, joyful), the country’s lead singer Helen Meles praises the president:

Adha of comely face, your words shook the horizon

Adha live on for us, so as the country will gain miracles

Adha may you live on, so as the world would sift its problems

You’ve been weighed on a balance of manliness

Hefty ceaseless courage, you never kneel

You compel the sun to bow down, let alone humans

Adha, may you live on, live on” (translated from Tigrinya by Tedros

Abraham)

In his regular interviews with the state media, President Afwerki talks for about half an hour uninterrupted. The questions are preapproved. The main role of the journalists is to help him transition from one topic to the next. Although they have stopped doing this, select quotes from his interviews were used as program transitions on state TV. Occasionally, the state media have portrayed the president as a magic healer, too. In March 2018, in an interview broadcast on state television, a long-ailing supporter testified that she recovered after an encounter with Afwerki at the Adi-Halo dam, his secondary “office.” Despite four surgeries, the woman had until then been unable to recover from severe knee injuries. She had been using a wheelchair until the trip to the dam. As the survivor recounts, President Afwerki lifted her from her wheelchair to bathe in what she described as the “holy water” of Adi-Halo dam. “To meet the president in

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person and touch his hand is almost like going to heaven,” she said on the broadcast. The woman testified that following the encounter her doctor declared she no longer needed the wheelchair (Zere, 2018a).

A main task of the Eritrean social media activists has been to challenge and deconstruct this seemingly invincible image of the president and his colleagues. For many Eritreans who have fled the country, the overwhelmingly positive image of the

Eritrean leadership fostered by state media has been difficult to undo. Some of the reasons for the long-sustained fear and adoration could also emanate from it.

Multiple methods have been used to deconstruct the image of President Afwerki.

One common means has been parodying his long interviews with the state media. After state media outlets announced an upcoming Afwerki interview, Eritrean social media platforms would be flooded with respondents producing audio and video clips anticipating how he would answer the questions. Some would try to satirically portray the terrified journalists whose roles had been reduced to a nod of approval. Others would mimic his style of beating around the bush and philosophizing without addressing the issues.

Countering the president’s own previous statements from the archives of his interviews has been another way of fact-checking the president. Produced in such comical ways, this vividly exposes the president’s flaws. Before this, the president’s claims never had been scrutinized.

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It is not only President Afwerki who has been the frequent target of satires, parodies and memes. Most prominent state officials are addressed with nicknames linked to some previous blunder. State officials who make misleading public statements have been subject to satire. For example, on April 1, 2019, Eritrea’s permanent representative to the African Union, Ambassador Araya Desta, tweeted: “Congratulations to all of us.

Milk and milk products will be abundant in Eritrea,” in reference to several hundred dairy cows that were imported (Desta, 2019). As milk price rose in the country, President

Afwerki reportedly had taken the personal initiative to import 300 dairy cows from

Europe and fly them to Eritrea. In order to provide space for the cows, the College of

Business and Economics that was located at the cows’ lab premises was forced to relocate, and students missed a semester during that transition (Schibbye, 2018). The ambassador became the target of numerous ridiculing replies and memes. Soon the

Eritrean social media filled up with references to Desta as the “cow-Ambassador.” But not all the replies made fun of the ambassador. UK-based Eritrean prominent scholar

Gaim Kibreab replied to Desta’s tweet: “Don’t you care about the college of economics

& business that was closed down? Where are the students? They were told to go home in the middle of the academic year. Such an act can only happen in present day Eritrea & u’r proud of it. What’s wrong with U Mr Ambassador?” If not for social media, Eritrean state officials would not be exposed to critical statements from the general public.

Most Eritrean state officials who use social media, particularly Twitter, are susceptible to instant ridicule, satire, and facts that contradict their claims. Unable to

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address the growing criticism, they habitually revert to blocking users who oppose their claims.

Social media has been used extensively to question, satirize, and ridicule the ruling party discourse. As diaspora activists lack access to accurate information, they use what is available publicly to fact-check, substantiate, and overall scrutinize the state narrative. The extensive use of satire and comedy has cut down to size the once-feared political elites. The wide use of satire, parody and jokes on the diaspora social media is now reaching Eritreans inside the country. ERISAT, one of the two satellite TV stations that broadcast to Eritrea (since December 2018), even has a segment on satire. This new trend both delegitimizes and challenges the political elites.

As the upcoming sections will explore, Eritrean social media have been filling the information drainage mainly through the discussed three mechanisms that challenge the state hegemony and at times take a proactive role in mounting a counter-offense. As the succeeding sections will show, using the three mechanisms discussed, Eritrean exiled activists have been able to shift the narrative.

Social Media Set to Upend Information Monopoly and Document Alleged Crimes

Secrecy is one of the core characteristic features of the Eritrean government. This trait has helped the regime to cement its fear-based rule and permitted perpetrators of the crimes to escape without penalty. In the words of researcher and journalist Martin Plaut

(2017), the secretive nature of the state is incomparable to any:

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Eritrea is no ordinary state; rather it resembles a criminal organization designed to

keep its citizens in perpetual servitude. It behaves like a mafia organization: with

covert finances but without a constitution, legislature or elections, run by the

country’s president and his closest associates. (2017, p. 662)

The absence of a functioning judiciary system in Eritrea further complicates this situation. As the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea (2015) reported: “Even if detainees are charged, the secrecy and insecurity caused by the denial of contact to the outside world and the fact that family members have no knowledge of their whereabouts and fate violate the presumption of innocence “ (p. 215). In a very decentralized and often dubbed chain of commands, families of disappeared citizens find it difficult to inquire about their loved ones. When taken to unknown dungeons, as the report of the Commission documents, prisoners would be covered in vehicles when approaching cities. This is to ensure that no one knows the exact location of the prisons; to conceal the prisoner from being seen from, and more importantly to hide the identity of the people transferring the prisoners (p. 228).

The mechanism of handling political prisoners is applied to a wide range of

“offenders” – from ordinary soldiers who have overstayed their leave to the highest- profile political prisoners. Eleven of the senior government officials and journalists who were imprisoned in September 2001 ever since have been kept in a heavily guarded detention center in a desolate area:

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The Commission was informed that the names of high-profile detainees are

sometimes replaced by numbers in order to ensure that guards cannot share

information on their whereabouts with their families. Despite repeated requests,

families remain uninformed of their whereabouts, and on the basis of the principle

of guilt by association, some family members have also been detained

incommunicado afterwards. (U.N., 2015, p. 225).

After the high-profile prisoners disappeared from a place called Embatkalla in

2003, not until 2010 did the prison where they had been held become known to the general public. In 2010, when a former prison guard fled and was interviewed by

Ethiopian media outlets, he detailed their conditions and revealed that they were kept in a prison called Eiraeiro.

Although the former prison guard provided alarming firsthand accounts of the conditions of the prisoners, his account had obvious limitations. As he was recounting from memory and did not have prior knowledge of most of the prisoners, combined with the prison’s tight security, he did lack some details. Fortunately, social media – a

Facebook page – later filled in many of the details and provided what seemed like an accurate date and condition of each prisoner as of the beginning of 2016.

Founded by an anonymous whistleblower in February 2016, the Facebook page called “Sactim: Classified Files of the Dwindling PFDJ” has served as the most reliable source for about two years. More than providing timely information, the Facebook page has exposed the nature and secrecy of the regime. The name “sactism” comes from a

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colloquial Arabic word that roughly translates as “nothing,” and was coined by the anonymous whistleblower behind the page who goes by “Samuel.” Besides the conditions of the high-profile prisoners, the Facebook page has published allegedly leaked files that detail the levels of corruption committed by people in power, extra- judicial killings by the state security, and detailed profiles of most of the key personalities in the security apparatus.

Posts published in Sactism have been widely shared on various Eritrean social media platforms and Eritrean independent websites and read on radio stations that broadcast to Eritrea. Many contacts confirm that the page has been extensively discussed and followed inside Eritrea. This has served many beneficial purposes. Alleged perpetrators of the crimes who enjoyed anonymity for so long began to be identified.

From collectively blaming some offices or departments, victims and relatives now started to identify the people behind the scenes.

The bulk of information published on the Sactism Facebook page was exceptionally detailed, and so unique that one could not ignore it. The page sometimes published images of leaked files, but usually was written in detailed analysis of the whistleblower. Although it was difficult to ascertain the veracity of all the information shared on the page, some claims have been independently confirmed either in full or part by other sources. This enhanced the credibility of the page.

“The regime was surviving mainly through the dread of information sharing,” wrote the page admin in February 2016. “I have made it my mission to fight such

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misinformation and secrecy of the regime. As a result, all the information shared on the page is most accurate.” According to a post on the page, although he has been approached by different media outlets, he preferred social media, particularly Facebook

(he later launched a website, too), “to operate at individual level and be part of the democratization of information sharing” (Zere, 2016)

The page was blocked by Facebook four times. It started publishing exclusively in the Tigrinya language, but Facebook blocked the page after receiving petitions from the

Eritrean regime and its supporters claiming the page was “inciting hatred.” To avoid such targeting, the page started some posts and included a blurb in English. At one point, the admin of the page (after being identified) was asked to provide an ID to match his name against the account per the Facebook procedure. As the whistleblower was using a fake account to run the page, he could not address the complaint and hence the page was banned by Facebook. After each ban, the whistleblower would open another similar page and continue posting, which quickly generated popular support (“Samuel,” personal communication, June 15, 2018).

With more than 54,000 subscribers (for the third fan page after being banned twice), the page had around 300,000 weekly hits with the highest total of 700,000 per week. As it published mainly in Tigrinya, most of the readers were assumed to be

Eritreans, with potentially some from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, as they have access to the language too (Samuel, personal communication, June 15, 2018). The outreach amounted to much more than regular visitors of the page, thanks to the amplifying effect

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of the traditional media, particularly Radio Assenna that broadcasts to Eritrea via short wave.

When state media have ignored newsworthy developments, the Sactism stepped into the news void, at the same time challenging the state’s media repression. As the page built credibility with good news scoops, which later would be corroborated and confirmed, this provided a new and exciting platform to challenge the status quo and dread silence. The reception to the page among the Eritrean diaspora was massive. For example, on Feb. 19, 2018, the page posted a breaking news story reporting that former

Minister of Foreign Affairs Haile “Durue” Weldensae died in a highly secure underground prison in Eiraeiro. Durue was one of the high-profile political prisoners who had been kept in incommunicado detention since September 2001. The post quickly went viral with more than 2,000 shares on Facebook and sparked a thread of comments that went beyond 4,500 in just a couple of days (Zere, 2018b). No one can verify or deny such claims in the Eritrean context. The previous prison guard who fled and gave an interview in 2010 stated at that time that Durue had been in frail health and had lost his eyesight.

The newsworthiness of such posts served as a wake-up call for the widely dispersed and divided Eritrean diaspora community. For weeks, it provoked conversation and was covered by various media outlets interested in Eritrea including the Voices of America

(Solomon, 2018) and gained international coverage on Al Jazeera English.

Another important role of the whistleblower’s Facebook page was profiling key personalities in the state security. Many of them had long enjoyed anonymity until the

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page began publishing extensive personal details of each of the most prominent perpetrators of the abuses, including their photos, addresses and sometimes telephone numbers. Such public disclosure creates a chilling effect and sense of accountability. At the very least, they now know they have been watched.

The Facebook page Sactism has not published since June 20, 2018. Although the page is still on Facebook, the fate of the whistleblower or the reason for his intermittent disappearance remains unknown. In many ways the Facebook page Sactism shook the status-quo. The page opened a new frontier, as Eritrean scholar Ghirmai Negash describes it: “a new genre in Eritrean writing, the importance of which lies in its subversive power in the context of a nation under tyranny” (Zere, 2016, para. 12). For those who live outside the country, the beneficial consequences were immediate. For example, the human rights lawyer Mekonnen relates that he, with his colleagues, has been exploring opening a court case against one former security personnel, currently residing in the West, after finding his name among those who had carried out the raid of the reformist group in 2001.

The Sactism Facebook page has not been the only social media outlet to help in documenting and exposing alleged crimes of the state in Eritrea. As indicated in the previous sections, Mekonnen and his team have used Paltalk firsthand accounts to collect testimonials for the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea.

Other initiatives have been taken by citizens who recognized the importance of documenting human rights abuses in the country. “Eritrea’s Disappeared,” a Facebook

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page, is one example of such. The page is dedicated to profiling Eritrean nationals who have disappeared or were abducted by state security and never brought to justice. U.S.- based exiled Eritrean writer Ahmed Raji, who founded and curates the page, argues that despite the wide abuses committed by the Eritrean government, as a result of lack of access and documentation, most victims have been reduced to names and numbers. To give them flesh and soul, he has been working with families and friends of the disappeared citizens to tell their stories and share photos.

“This was my modest contribution to show the Eritrean perpetrators of crimes that although they lack the means to resist now, people are watching out. I believe this might be a contribution for later if we start court cases in democratic and free Eritrea after change,” says Raji (Mekonnen, 2020, para. 2nd). “Eritrea’s Disappeared” has archived photos and basic information of 60 disappeared Eritrean nationals and continues to work on dozens of others who had a similar fate.

Live Facebook discussions have created the opportunity for many exiled Eritreans to openly discuss the abuses they have suffered in Eritrea. Although it might not be used as firsthand evidence for court cases, this helps many conquer their fear. For the perpetrators of crimes in Eritrea, as most of the social media conversations get amplified by the traditional media, these discussions quickly hit home.

Both through individual and collective initiatives, Eritrean social media have been instrumental in documenting, exposing, and creating a semblance of accountability.

Though this can be argued as the most common feature of social media in other countries

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as well, what makes the Eritrean case unique is the lack of any other means of challenging the information monopoly. While countering the strict top-down information flow, social media activists encouraged many exiled Eritreans to take matters in hand.

This created space for the silenced nationals to share their stories unmediated.

#Yiakl: From Social Media Campaign to Grassroots Movement

As discussed in the section “Eritrea: the state, transnational identity and dual roles,” the comprehensive control of the Eritrean government over its citizens both in and outside the country has cemented its authority. This section will discuss the different social media-driven challenges to the Eritrean government. By framing through Hardt and Negri (2012)’s assertions of social media as the main instruments in disrupting the state narrative, this section will address how social media has been changing the landscape of Eritrean opposition.

After Eritrea signed the peace deal with neighboring Ethiopia in July 2018, effectively ending 20 years of deadlock, the stakes and expectations for Eritreans couldn’t have been higher. For years, the Eritrean government had used the unsettled border issue with Ethiopia as the singular pretext for all its misrule. Hopes that the

Eritrean government would follow the example of Ethiopia’s promising initial reforms

(such as releasing political prisoners and permitting free media and political parties) were quickly dashed. Instead, nationals began fleeing Eritrea in droves where on average about

300 Eritreans have been crossing to Ethiopia every day (UNHCR, 2019). The peace deal was further reinforced by the lifting of U.N. sanctions on Eritrea and allowing the country

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to join the U.N, Human Rights Council, effectively ending any possible excuses the elites in power could produce to avoid lifting repressive policies (Morello, 2018). The high expectations and corresponding failure of the Eritrean government to introduce reforms have provoked Eritrean diaspora activists to exert pressure through social media.

The collective frustrations have been manifested in different forms. The initial springboard for sharing the wider feeling of disenchantments has been through Twitter.

In January 2019, some individuals formed a group on Twitter (of which I was a member) to collaborate, discuss, and amplify campaigns. The group that initially started with fewer than 10 people later grew to comprise more than 100, and around the same time other initiatives were taken. “#Yiakl” (meaning “enough is enough” in Tigrinya) emerged from the deliberation of the group as a catchy word to describe the growing discontent. The hashtag with major Eritrean languages and English eventually turned into a collective campaign symbol.

“I realized there was an opportunity in social media to get organized, form partnerships and collaborations. It turns out, I was not the only one who came to that realization, and to my surprise so many people were eager to collaborate and exploit social media as a tool against the Eritrean regime,” explains “Fithawit,” who created the group on Twitter that later came up with the campaign slogan, #Yiakl. “In less than a year, #Yiakl has become a global resistance phenomenon and invigorated tens of thousands of Eritreans all over the world to voice their opposition to the regime of Isaias

Afwerki” (Fithawit, personal communication, Dec. 14, 2019).

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Prior to that, Twitter had been dominated by Eritrean government supporters. Part of the #Yiakl campaign was to bring as many people on board as possible in order to take over the platform from regime sympathizers. The campaign has served two functions: it helped the silent majority to speak out. Secondly, it incorporated many of the second generation of Eritreans who were either sympathetic to the regime or were less engaged mainly because they had been left out of prior discussions. As much of the conversations on Eritrean politics has been in local languages, it excluded the second generation of

Eritreans living in the diaspora.

In mid-February 2019, the #Yiakl campaign extended to Facebook. The Facebook campaign, however, took on a different form when thousands of Eritreans challenged (in ice-bucket challenge style) their peers and recorded a short video clip and shared it on social media. The clips mainly addressed the outstanding issues, told the personal stories of individuals who have suffered abuses, and encouraged others to come out and speak.

"I started this initiative because I needed to know how long we would keep hiding our identities in this fight. The main agenda was to make ourselves visible and convey our message to the people of Eritrea as well as to the government," Washington

D.C.-based Amanuel “Dawa,” who initiated the video challenge, told the BBC (Bekit,

2019). As the promoter hoped, it encouraged thousands of men and women to conquer their fear and openly separate from the regime that has long sustained its rule by instilling fear-based loyalty. Many people who were hiding behind fake names on social media for fear of reprisal came out and revealed their identities.

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In their delivery and framing, the messages of the campaign covered a range of outstanding issues. Many have been demanding an immediate demarcation of borders, restating the rule of law, and the unconditional release of prisoners of conscience. Others were less hopeful that the government would change its ways and introduce reforms.

Instead they urged fellow Eritreans to bridge their differences and channel their efforts to oust the regime. Religious leaders from both main faiths have called for unity and expressed their support. Yet others urged the silent majority to come out and show their rage. Indeed, many, including former supporters of the regime, came out and openly dissociated themselves from it. The country’s leading exiled artists joined the campaign and amplified the messages of unity. Eritrea’s most prominent exiled singer Yohannes

Tikabo composed a song and eulogized:

Enough to division, migration and horrendous journey

Enough to incarcerating people without the due process of law in dungeons

Enough to ruling without constitution (translated from Tigrinya)

The campaign messages have dominated Eritrean social media, and with help from the diaspora-based independent media, got amplified to reach inside the country. At the international level, the campaigns have attracted leading media outlets such as CNN

Africa, BBC, and Al Jazeera English.

The human rights lawyer Mekonnen describes the #Yaikl campaign as the most significant development experienced by the Eritrean opposition, both in sending a unified

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message and pulling apart the tentacles of the Eritrean regime’s control. Participants of my research describe its effects in different ways.

Over the last few years, the Eritrean regime has been steadily losing control of the diaspora community, estimated at between a third and half of the country’s population.

Ever since the war of liberation, the Eritrean diaspora had offered strong support and was essentially the nation’s final bastion. Thanks to the continued lobbying of activists, many countries have outlawed the Eritrean state’s 2 percent diaspora tax, which is levied by the government on other states’ consular offices if citizens need any service from the state.

The regime’s previous base of support has drastically dwindled; the yearly diaspora festivals are diminishing, or else they are facing fierce resistance among the Eritrean opposition to the extent that they keep their locations secret until the last minute. The few who had genuinely considered the regime’s long-standing excuses for repression as legitimate have come to learn the hard way that they were only pretexts to extend its rule.

Huge turnouts of Eritreans to openly oppose the state’s policies on social media signified an official separation from the government. It has become more difficult for the state security to resort to the old practice of retaliating against family members in the country.

By installing fear and mistrust, and more importantly by creating a narrative that resonated with most Eritreans, the Eritrean government had succeeded in undermining and silencing potential opposition. Despite the huge outward flow of refugees, the tradition among Eritreans in the diaspora has been to keep quiet in fear of possible retaliation to family members at home. Some even believed that the regime’s security

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apparatus was capable of targeting dissidents in the West. This fear has largely dissipated as many Eritreans living abroad have begun showing their faces and openly recording messages that discredit the regime.

The #Yiakl campaign served as a call to drop support for the regime and join the opposition camp. “The campaign has been a very crucial tipping point in the scale of between people being afraid of the government back in Eritrea or being indecisive and deciding to do something about it,” says the exiled journalist Gerrima. The crystallization of the decade-long gestation of discontent and uniting the opposition in a single cause has been another important aspect of the campaign, argues Gerrima.

The campaign has opened the door for many previously silenced citizens to share their personal accounts. This is an important development, breaking the long tradition of

Eritreans being shy about sharing their personal stories. These stories have helped fill the information gap and reveal the magnitude of the abuses.

The Eritrean government has been striving to create the impression that the whole

Eritrean diaspora strongly supports its policies. This message has been hammered through the state media and public seminars. The prime target audience of the Eritrean state media has been the Eritrean diaspora, members of which many consider as the sole guardians of the nation due to their romanticized portrayals on the media. As a result, many Eritreans inside the country have characterized the majority of their fellow nationals in the diaspora as accomplices of the regime and its only lifeline of support. All

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of the respondents argue that this perception has changed since the rapprochement with

Ethiopia.

Organizers of the campaign, independent media editors and activists who have been interviewed for this research believe that #Yiakl’s strong messages of solidarity that have been amplified by the independent media – and its huge resulting audience – have shifted the perception. The horizontal communication has helped forge trust and support between the people inside and outside the country, after a long period of disconnection.

Many in the diaspora have sent messages of encouragement to those remaining in Eritrea, with assurances that they feel and share their suffering. Some have recorded videos from inside the country (without showing their faces) and posted them on social media to express their support and announce that the campaign has been well received inside the country.

The new wave of challenges has helped unify the widely scattered Eritrean opposition forces that heretofore have been divided along ethnic, religious and gender lines, through years of struggle. By disregarding the traditional hierarchy of opposition parties or civic organizations, a new breed of youth, empowered by social media, has come to the forefront. The fact that the opposition has become decentralized has allowed everyone to claim participation.

The Eritrean government does not typically respond to such trends. Neither does it acknowledge the opposition. State officials downgrade the opposition as “angry,”

“disgruntled” nationals. The #Yiakl campaign, however, seemed too big to be ignored.

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Among the few state officials who are active on social media, particularly Twitter, the minister of information, Mr. Yemane G. Meskel, without any specifics, tweeted: “Unable to fathom the historic/rapid regional changes, Eritrea's avowed enemies & their local minions have remained confused & fazed for months now. This is why they are vainly scavenging for mundane issues to cast aspersions on the process. Prudence demands that they are ignored!” (Meskel, 2019b). Eritrea’s ambassador to Kenya has mocked the movement and challenged the activists to bring actual change on the ground instead of hiding on social media (Russom, 2019). One of the regime’s most favored poets, Awel

Seid, mocked the movement in a state-sponsored show in February 2020. The performance was televised and broadcast live on the country’s media.

The #Yiakl campaign was followed by two prominent social media campaigns.

One of them, #HappyBirthdayCiham, intended to raise awareness about Eritrea-

American teenager Ciham Ali Abdu, who was spending her seventh birthday behind bars without charges. Ciham had been targeted in retaliation for her father, who was the

Eritrean minister of information but later fled and sought political asylum in Australia.

The campaign was spearheaded by Vanessa Tsehaye. Like the #Yiakl campaign,

#HappyBirthdayCiham got covered by Al Jazeera Stream, Voice of America, and CNN.

Organizations like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International joined the campaign. In April 2019, during Ciham’s birthday, U.S. Rep. Karen Bass spoke about her in one of her town hall meetings. Bass at that time chaired the U.S. House of

Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human

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Rights and International Organizations. She visited Eritrea in March 2019 at the head of a congressional committee. In her talk, Congresswoman Bass said she would do her best both through the U.S. embassy in Eritrea and the Eritrean state representatives in the U.S. to insist that Ciham’s fate be clarified (SaveErirea, 2019). Rep. Bass (2019) later tweeted,

“I was in Eritrea just last month. The country’s leaders should release Ciham, who had a birthday this past week, and all of Eritrea’s political prisoners to send a message that the country is embarking on a new path that includes respect for human rights.”

As Tsehaye was leading #HappyBirthDayCiham, the campaign attracted the second generation of Eritreans. Before, they were either left out and or less engaged on many Eritrean affairs. Many who sought connection with their home country, either through their parents' influence or the outreach of the ruling party, joined the diaspora youth branch, YPFDJ. The #Yiakl campaign, however, attracted many of the second generation in the Eritrean diaspora. A similar social media campaign under

#Purpule4Ciham was launched on her birthday in April 2020, too. The latter campaign gained similar traction.

By incorporating the second generation of Eritrean diaspora, the #Yiakl campaign was able to traverse territories the recent comers had been unable to reach. One example of this is targeting messaging to celebrities and state representatives as happened with the campaign of #HappyBirthDayCiham. With better access and familiarity to the international community, the role of the second generation of Eritreans has been to influence their fellow Eritreans and bring the Eritrean plight to the attention of the

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international community. Challenging and enlightening their fellow countrymen and women who have failed to use their privileges to help those back home has been an example. For example, when Emmy Award winner, Eritrean-American comedian Tiffany

Haddish seemed oblivious to the Eritrean suffering, a group of young Eritrean-Americans approached her to discuss and remind her to take a stand. In 2019, Haddish, who was born to an Eritrean father and an American mother, acquired Eritrean citizenship and she held the center stage in the nation’s Independence Day celebration. What unsettled many was when Haddish gave an autographed copy of her debut book to President Isaias

Afwerki and wrote, “Isaias, my brother, my president, thank you for doing what you do.”

Haddish’s endorsement of the country’s president was more than symbolic.

Initially, it triggered a social media uproar. Some Eritrean activists decided to approach her personally and discuss the matter. In a group chat on Twitter, she doubled down on her praise of the country’s president and floated the idea of taking some American celebrities back to Eritrea in hopes of improving the country’s image. After repeated attempts to dissuade her from supporting the regime, any hopes that Haddish would come on board seemed futile. To publicly shame her and castigate her negligence, the group took the matter further and published an exposé. In March 2020, Vanessa Tsehaye, who had joined the conversation at some point, wrote a piece, including screenshots of the private conversation, for BuzzFeed News: “Tiffany Haddish praised Eritrea's dictator.

Then she doubled down in DMs with young Eritrean Americans.” One of the group

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organizers, Eritrean-American Yodit Araya, told Tsehaye, “We are against her, as a superstar with the platform she has, normalizing our dictator.”

Scrutiny of Haddish was driven by the wave of #Yiakl campaign. While many prominent Eritrean figures such as artists were asked to support the campaign, Haddish’s support of the Eritrean president ran against the tide of current events. Regime supporters have been used her endorsement as proof of the popularity of the Eritrean government.

Haddish’s public shaming for endorsing the Eritrean autocratic ruler sent a signal that supporting the repressive regime back home does not come without a consequence.

#EngHighschoolInSawa was another social media campaign that amplified the grassroots initiative. Conceived in Eritrea, the underground campaign sought to resist and question the practice of sending students as young as 16 years old to the military camp.

The campaign started in early June 2019 with wall graffiti and distribution of posters in

Asmara, Eritrea’s capital. Messages circulating in public places inside the country quickly reached and circulated on social media. The campaign was spearheaded by former students of the high school, now in exile, who shared their firsthand experiences and the difficulties they met in the military school.

“The most important impact of the #EndHighSchoolInSawa campaign was that it re-sensitized so many Eritreans that were numb and accepted this hideous policy as normal. Crucially, our message reached high school students in Eritrea, a critical step towards enlightening our people inside Eritrea,” maintains Fithawit, who has been among the core group behind the campaign and herself studied at the school (Fithawit, personal

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communication, Dec. 14, 2019). Samuel Tsegai, a former student of the school, has been at the forefront of the campaign. He explained that the idea was conceived by students/activists inside the country but lacked access to the outside world. On top of the sustained social media campaigns, #EndHighSchoolInSawa made use of traditional media – radio and TV stations that reach Eritrea. Although the campaign did not stop many students from going to Sawa for their high school, Tsegai believes that it succeeded in hitting its target: “The most effective result of the campaign was to bring the issue to the agenda and attention of the common people. Many parents have been sending their children to the school and never questioned the practice. The campaign effectively brought the problems associated with the program, mainly because former students lacked the platform to speak about the school” (S. Tsegai, personal communication, Dec.

7, 2019).

The campaign reportedly prompted Human Rights Watch (HRW) to release a special issue regarding the militarized education in Sawa. The 84-page HRW report,

“‘They are making us into slaves, not educating us’: How indefinite conscription restricts young people’s rights, access to education in Eritrea,” documents how the Eritrean government has been forcing thousands of young children into indefinite conscription

(HRW, 2019). The report later was picked up by international media outlets such as

South Africa’s leading newspaper Mail and Guardian (Allison, 2019) and Voice of

America (Solomon, 2019). Human Rights Watch took the case further. The European

Union had been funneling development funds to Eritrea, particularly after the peace deal

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with Ethiopia. As the E.U. seemed less critical of the gross human rights abuses in

Eritrea, in February 2020, HRW delivered a statement to the European Parliament’s

Committee on Development, particularly on militarized schools (HRW, 2019c).

Most of the interviewees credit the #Yiakl campaign as being the most significant factor that allowed the social media campaign to establish grassroot organizations and create civil society. This is a similar to what the Black Lives Matter movement has achieved in the USA. From its conception on social media, the movement branched out to grassroots organization and local chapters (Hillstorm, 2018)

In July 2019, activists called for a general meeting under the umbrella of #Yiakl in Washington D.C. Various states and cities elected representatives and sent delegates to participate in the meeting. A #Yiakl assembly was formed in the D.C. and created chapters in major cities across the U.S.A. Both in raising money, coordination and formulating grassroots mass organizations, the campaign effectively took over the space that has been dominated by the PFDJ ruling party (Hailemariam, 2019). Encouraged by the Washington gathering, Eritreans living in other countries followed suit. As of the beginning of March 2020, Eritreans in Canada, U.K., Sweden, and Switzerland had formed assemblies that aim to facilitate, raise money and support Eritreans who might take the initiative to unseat the ruling party. As an organized force they hope to exert more leverage and pressure states and organizations that are associated with the Eritrean government. Later during the COVID-19 pandemic, Eritreans all over the world under the umbrella of Global Yiakl, raised money and resources to help vulnerable Eritreans in

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the refugee camps of Ethiopia and Sudan. This has been the first time in the history of the independent country that citizens who oppose the government have been able to freely discuss and strategize without fear of reprisal or under threat to be disrupted by the state agencies on a large scale.

Such open discussions outside the interference of Eritrean state agencies created a fertile ground for the birth of civic society. While all NGOs and civil society have been banned inside Eritrea, to a lesser extent the diaspora has been controlled through the

Eritrean regime’s consular offices. Horizontal discussions – and being partly motivated by the decisive role of Sudanese civic society in facilitating change – have inspired some to organize themselves. This further branched out into professional associations. For example, on Feb. 21, 2020, Eritrean professional musicians, songwriters, dramatists, and composers gathered in Switzerland and established the Eritrean Artists Association for

Change. This was the first of its kind and significant considering the fact that one of the

PFDJ party’s most effective propaganda tools has been through artists. With the reward of heavy state investment, most Eritrean artists have been reduced to praise-singers. As the exiled journalist Fathi Osman noted, “The initiative of forming this association is a landmark in the march of free Eritrean music. It also calls upon other Eritrean professionals such as lawyers, journalists, accountants, and others to combine their efforts and unite their willpowers in the fight against dictatorship in Eritrea,” (Osman, 2020).

Eritrean women in U.S.A. and their successful conference in February 2020 in

Washington, D.C., was another initiative inspired with the wave of #Yiakl. Around 700

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Eritrean women and some men, from many American states, participated in the two-day event. The conference incorporated a range of generations of Eritrean women and provided the opportunity to discuss and deliberate on the outstanding issues that Eritrean women are suffering under inside the country (BBC Tigrinya, 2020). Starting with its slogan (“From #Enough to We Can”), the conference was intended to give further impetus to the #Yiakl campaign.

The Eritrean Health Professionals Network (EHPN), an apolitical and non- partisan civic association, was organizing its first conference in April 2020 but had to suspend the event due to the COVID-19 pandemic (EHPN, 2020). Other civil society organizations such as the Eritrean Law Society have increased their engagements.

Although its pace has been disrupted by the pandemic, the collective #Yiakl wave has inspired the widely scattered Eritreans to discuss greater national interests outside of the state’s influence. Previously, the Front, during the war of independence, and later the ruling party have successfully tapped the potential of the Eritrean diaspora in creating mass organizations. The opposition is now following a similar model of mass organizing.

Overall, the #Yiakl movement has challenged the Eritrean government in multiple ways. It stopped the long reign of fear-based loyalty that had been a hallmark of the

Eritrean diaspora. With that fear substantially eroded, many people in the diaspora have cut ties with the state and ceased paying the 2% diaspora tax. They halted summer visits to Eritrea that had been generating money for the country’s frail economy and providing

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a moral boost to the regime. Eritrean state elites, who know all too well the effectiveness of support from the diaspora, likewise are now seeing how damaging it can be working against them.

The Eritrean government has long influenced and shaped the Eritrean diaspora through the country’s consular offices. Such extra-territorial influence discouraged formation of independent civil society associations. As a result of the new wave and consequent weakening of state apparatuses, various professional associations are now being created. As seen in the case of Sudan, the role of these organizations in facilitating changes cannot be undermined. Although their formation is a significant departure from the former system, these volunteer-established organizations are widely scattered, which limits what they can do. But the very idea of forming such independent civic organizations itself is a substantial step.

Shaping the Music Production; Disarming the State Propaganda

The surge of online music, mainly on YouTube, has reshaped the Eritrean music industry, which until recently had been mainly characterized by patriotic themes. In addition to the global shifts of means music production, the huge Eritrean diaspora has played a significant role in changing the theme. To put the matter into greater perspective, I will first discuss the structure of Eritrean music production. Then I will lay out how social media is reshaping the country’s music production. Reforms in Eritrean music production is key to dismantling one of the strongest pillars of the ruling party’s propaganda apparatus.

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Since the era of the Eritrean war of independence, music has played a vital role in mobilizing the population. As Christine Matzke contends, “The Eritrean People's

Liberation Front (EPLF) maintained a central cultural troupe which mounted variety shows comprising music, songs, dramatic sketches and ancestral dances for propaganda purposes and recreation,” (2004, p. 26). EPLF used music to recruit new fighters and inspire its army to fight. After Eritrea’s independence in 1991, the same structure was adopted in the independent country. Artists continued to be monitored under the ruling party’s various organs. Eritrean singers today are either army conscripts serving in divisions labeled “Information and Agitation” or are classified as civil servants of the ruling party’s Cultural Affairs Bureau. Both organs produce works of art that promote official policy. They are called upon during national holidays and government campaigns. As Ismail Einashe (2015a) writes, a significant proportion of the Eritrean music produced after the country’s independence is “staunchly patriotic” (para, 13).

There are reasons why the artistic production of the country has been so patriotic.

The ruling party uses the yearly Eritrean diaspora festivals and many seminars with cultural shows for propaganda. For the Eritrean artists to perform in the state-sponsored events, they must produce patriotic songs that reflect the tours’ themes. Inside the country, if musicians want to make a name for themselves and get the necessary attention, they have only one channel, the state “ERI-TV with its usual mix of patriotic music, videos of heroic fighters in Eritrea’s past wars, Eritrean soap operas, and the

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occasional speech by the president or other high-ranking officials.” (Müller, 2012, p.

453).

Censorship began in earnest with the political crackdown in 2001. This has been another mechanism that contributed to the production of patriotic songs. Before being able to broadcast or print their work, artists have had to endure long waiting periods before hearing from the censorship unit, which consisted of a single official. Artists would not dare submit anything sensitive, and gaining approval was effectively reduced to appealing to the personal tastes of the censorship chief. The effect of this was that singers hoping to pass the screening process – and qualify for publicity or even state- sponsored tours – ensured their songs were brimming with praise of the government.

Such an arrangement has coerced Eritrean artists living in the country to produce patriotic songs in hopes of getting even minor access.

Since 2016, the practice of censorship has been eased. This has allowed many artists inside the country to work with the intention of appealing to the wider Eritrean audience outside the country. Music production has been transformed by musicians increasingly bypassing state broadcasters and turning to YouTube. Rather than having to rely on government-controlled channels to distribute their music, artists started uploading it themselves. Over a dozen hugely popular YouTube channels dedicated to Eritrean music were founded as the market was booming. Their songs regularly receive several million hits.

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This new development has neutralized the government’s supreme authority to decide which Eritrean musicians get heard. It has led to a diversification of the types of songs being listened to. It lighted the fuse on increasing disregard for the government’s strategy of only allowing sufficiently patriotic songs to be disseminated. In fact, forces are now pushing in the opposite direction.

Subscribers to the YouTube channels live in the diaspora, and for them, the comment sections under videos act as public forums. They often challenge and criticize songs they see as being out of tune with the prevailing attitude of questioning and criticizing the regime at home. If singers continue to produce praise songs and upload them on YouTube, the reactions are very quick with listeners openly calling for their boycott. The results are shown immediately. As the market drives the output, the owners of YouTube channels similarly do not want to risk tarnishing their credibility by allowing disfavored singers.

In Eritrea itself, connections are too slow to easily listen to music online.

However, the aforementioned use of YouTube has had an indirect salient effect on listenership. After uploading their music videos on YouTube, many singers and producers distribute them to internet cafes. They, in turn, lend them to customers on flash-disks. In effect, these Eritrean internet cafes became digital libraries or offline versions of popular YouTube channels.

The new methods of music distribution have changed the taste of Eritrean music makers and consumers, and reshaped the music’s themes. Producers must make sure to

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appeal to the growing online music consumer, people in the Eritrean diaspora with access to YouTube. For those who had fled from repression, or artists who had been indirectly coerced to produce praise songs, they no longer see any reason to follow the old tradition. If some insist on producing patriotic songs for listening in the diaspora, they’ll find they have no consumers.

The ruling elites obviously can detect the dramatic shift of themes in production and the greater independence artists are enjoying. Many singers who had previously produced praise songs are doing the opposite after fleeing from the country. Many of the country’s top singers and musicians have absconded while abroad on state-sponsored tours.

It seems partly to discourage the growing independence in art production that

Eritrean state security launched a crackdown targeting the music producers and owners of the YouTube channel, mainly the Germany-based Yonas Debas. Debas was the first

Eritrean to open a YouTube channel, LYE TV. When he returned to Eritrea in January

2017, to meet artists and produce songs, he was picked up and put in military custody with his production team. The team was finally released from military prison after nine months without due process of law, while others had fled to escape the crackdown

(Tewlede, 2017). This was a clear and frightening message to the many artists who had been working to be heard on the Eritrean YouTube channels.

During the #Yiakl campaign, the country’s leading artists in exile joined forces and began mobilizing. Many of the young generation of singers who recently had fled the

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country composed songs calling for an end of dictatorship. Other singers have performed for free in events or else recorded messages expressing their support for the movement. A failure to show solidarity in these critical times started to cost artists who couldn’t afford to lose YouTube viewership or have less support for live shows.

In a culmination of the shift in Eritrean art and music production, exiled artists have now created the Eritrean Artist Association for Change in February 2020 in

Switzerland (Osman, 2020). The role of social media, particularly YouTube, in crystalizing the widely felt feelings of dissatisfaction with the regime has been clear.

Unlike the old times, the ruling party has found it hard to lure people in the Eritrean diaspora to their events that have been characterized with music production.

The shift in music tastes is an extension of the overall change in the country’s political landscape and a reflection of collective sentiments. Social media has obvious limitations since the most it can do is create a platform for communication. Yet, it’s a major accomplishment to be able to unify the widely scattered Eritrean voices. It has allowed them to talk to one another horizontally, as opposed to the longstanding top- down approach. So far, the major achievement has been to demystify the seemingly

“untouchable” regime and overcome Eritreans’ pervasive fear of it. This in turn served as a springboard, adding impetus for better and more practical organization. The Eritrean opposition had lacked space to organize and strategize both inside the country and in the diaspora. Starting from the pre-independence and running to recent years, Eritrean state organs have dominated independent platforms. As many scholars who have studied the

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Eritrean diaspora maintain, the tentacles of the ruling party have succeeded in silencing dissident voices through coercion and luring (Hirt & Mohammad, 2018; Hepner, 2009;

Bernal, 2014). Social media, with all its limitations, has created an independent platform.

Many of the organizations are at the nascent stage and face various constraints, but nonetheless this is another promising step forward. Despite all the limitations, a shift has occurred in the balance of power, and the opposition has started to influence policies and actions of the Eritrean government.

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Chapter 4: Ethiopian Social Media Activists in Challenging One-party Rule

This chapter will deal with how Ethiopian social media facilitated the overdue political domination of Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary

Democratic Front (EPRDF). It will start with how EPRDF enacted controversial decrees that attempted to limit access and dissemination of information. It will then cover the early bloggers who attempted to serve as points of contact between the international community and the heretofore inaccessible country, after major media outlets had been banned and their editors exiled. Increasing internet access, mobile data and widespread use smartphones gave birth to the Oromo Protests that finally challenged the pervasive police state. This chapter will similarly deal with other measures that Ethiopian state security employed to silence exiled activists including hacking, lobbying and other mechanisms. While Ethiopian state security tried different mechanisms to retain power, such as state of emergency, internet ban, and mass arrests to intimidate protesters inside the country, the chapter also will cover how activists have been redoubling their efforts to take proactive steps to hack senior state officials. The chapter will address the situation after political change in Ethiopia, including the new social media-driven difficulties.

EPRDF’s Promising Start but Swift Shift

Since 1991, with the overthrow of the Derg Marxist regime, Ethiopia has been ruled by a de-facto one-party state, the EPRDF. Until his death in 2012, the country was led by Meles Zenawi, from the Tigray region, the minority ethnic group in Ethiopia.

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Following Zenawi’s sudden death, he was succeeded by his deputy, Hailemariam

Desalegn from the Southern nations, a minority in the ruling coalition.

After 2005, following a deadly election, Ethiopia descended into a repressive state and stayed there for many years. The opposition coalition had reportedly secured one- third of the parliamentary seats. This unexpected surge did not suit the ruling elites, and hence they disregarded the outcome. That resulted in a political crackdown in which opposition politicians fled, independent media were banned, and many editors were imprisoned for reportedly inciting violence. Following the brutal crackdown, all opposition parties were either reluctant to participate or were banned. In 2010, the

EPRDF ruling coalition secured 99.6 seats in the parliament (Tronvoll, 2011, p. 121).

There were initial hopes that EPRDF might loosen its tight grip after Zenawi’s death and even tolerate divergent views. These hopes quickly faded, further escalating fears. In the 2015 elections, despite widely shared collective rage, EPRDF won 100% of the seats in parliament (Abbink, 2017).

The independent media was among the first casualties of the post-2005 elections crackdown. Between 2005 and 2007, Ethiopia saw the closure of 35 independent newspapers, with most of the editors ending up in exile or being imprisoned (Bekele,

2019, p. 8).

The government drafted various proclamations that curtailed accessing and disseminating information. The 2008 Mass Media and Freedom of Information

Proclamation was the initial step prohibiting journalists from imparting and disseminating

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information. This was followed by the 2009 Proclamation to Provide for the Registration and Regulation of Charities and Societies (CSP) that restricted civic society members from accessing information. The Anti-Terror proclamation implemented in August 2009 further hampered the already frail state. These decrees enabled the government to clamp down on any dissident voices (Mengesha, 2016, p. 90; Dugo, 2016, p. 398). With those three proclamations, the government started targeting journalists on trumped-up charges.

Many journalists ended up in prison, making Ethiopia one of the worst jailers of journalists in Africa, while the few lucky ones fled. According to Human Rights Watch

(2019d), since 2010, at least 60 Ethiopian journalists have fled into exile.

Against this backdrop, Ethiopian activists began making demands. As will be discussed in the subsequent sections, many of the journalists who had been forced into exile were the ones who had spearheaded the demand for change. Through long and sustained protests, using nonviolence struggle, the ruling coalition finally was challenged.

Multiple layers of resistance on different fronts forced the former prime minister,

Hailemariam Desalegn, to resign in February 2018 and opened the way for Abiy Ahmed.

With opposition parties outlawed, dissidents exiled, and independent media banned, social media remained the only means of resistance.

Bloggers Say “We Blog, because We Care”; the Government Disagrees

When most of the meaningful media outlets were banned and their editors either fled or ended up in custody after the 2005 election, this led to an information vacuum.

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Traditional media found it difficult if not impossible to operate. The youth had to move to online platforms to share and deliberate their plight. The frustrations of the youth coupled with the social media driven popular uprising in the MENA region inspired some people to take an active role.

This gave birth to Zone 9 Bloggers, a blogging collective that was founded in

May 2012. The group took its name from Ethiopia’s Kalitiy maximum security prison, divided into eight zones with political prisoners held in Zone 8. The group, whose motto in Amharic was “We blog because we care,” reasoned that the country itself was a big prison, Zone 9 (Gagliardone & Pohjonen, 2016). The blogging collective covered political and social issues, including stories of journalists in prison, which all were out of bounds in the traditional media.

According the founding members of Zone 9 Bloggers, the initial trigger came after some of most widely read newspapers, particularly Addis Neger, were banned and its editors fled the country. Addis Neger continued online; members of the Zone 9 blog, would then discuss and share the articles that were posted online. This informal engagement later crystalized into collective blogging.

“I wanted to break down the fear. I wanted an independent media in Ethiopia,” the co-founder of the collective blog, Endalkachew Chala, told Index on Censorship

Magazine (Einashe, 2015b, p. 74). Edom Kassaye was one of the two women who were founding members. Kassaye, who was studying at the School of Journalism at the

University of Missouri at the time of the interview, tells how the group came about

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organically as the newspaper – Addis Neger – started to phase out. The editors were in exile and lacked access to information from the ground. The group started to discuss issues of greater concern and understood the relevance of such platforms. Inspired by the youth initiatives in the MENA region, particularly Egypt, the group started to read books, discuss their contents, and explore the possibilities of similar initiatives. Due to

Ethiopia’s dark history, Kassaye argues, many were reluctant to take any action against the government. Her generation, however, has been shielded from such actions and

“naively” thought they could bring change and if so, it must come from inside (E.

Kassaye, personal communication, Nov. 19, 2019).

The reality for the Ethiopian youth, however, was different from what they had been reading about in the MENA region. “Although the internet has democratized storytelling,” with less than 2% of penetration rate at that time and controlled by the state,

Chala argues, that has been made it very difficult (Einashe, 2015b, p. 75). As Kassaye reflects, the collective blog started to pose critical questions, which otherwise wouldn't have been possible in the media inside the country. Political repression, corruption, and prison conditions were some of the issues covered by the blog. With frequently blocked inside Ethiopia, the Zone 9 bloggers started to gain traction among the Ethiopian diaspora where some posts would generate about 200,000 hits per week (CPJ, 2015b).

Each of the nine bloggers had their own jobs and they did not have an office. Yet, they met regularly to strategize, write press releases, and discuss events that needed more attention. Realizing there was no media outlet in Ethiopia that could publish their

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campaigns or press releases, they started to invite and engage leading international media outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.

Kassaye reflects that initially the state security dismissed them “as noise makers.” With their intensity and having secured international allies, however, it became impossible for the state to undermine them. For the international media that lacked access to inside scoops or civil society that sought information, the group began serving as a point of entry. “The noise makers” then began having a voice, and their tips started to damage the image of the political elites, when they reached the international community. Hence, the state security started to closely follow the group, tap their phone conversations, and contacted some members individually with a carrot and stick approach. A security officer approached Kassaye and softly promised that he could arrange for her to leave the country and live in the West if she collaborated with him. Kassaye refused, making it clear that no one was behind them and they, “were just exercising our constitutional rights,” (E. Kassaye, personal communication, Nov. 19, 2019).

On April 28th, 2014 in what CPJ described, as “one of the worst crackdowns against free expression in the country,” Ethiopian authorities arrested nine journalists, six of them members of Zone 9. Some of the members, like Chala, who had been abroad escaped the raid. The journalist and bloggers were accused of “working with foreign human rights organizations and using social media to create instability in the country.”

Prior to their arrests, the bloggers had suspended posting for seven months, after being harassed by the state security (CPJ, 2014).

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“These are not journalists. Their arrest has nothing to do with journalism but with serious criminal activities,” Getachew Reda, an adviser to Prime Minister Hailemariam

Desalegn, told Reuters then. “We don’t crack down on journalism or freedom of speech.

But if someone tries to use his or her profession to engage in criminal activities, then there is a distinction there,” (Reuters, 2014, para 9-10). According to the same Reuters report, in 2012, an Ethiopian court sentenced a prominent blogger and five Ethiopian journalists between eight years and life on charges linked to allegedly fomenting instability.

The terrorism charge has been leveled by different state officials on other occasions. About a year later after the arrests of the bloggers and other journalists, Prime

Minister Dessalegn told Al Jazeera’s Martine Dennis, “The moment you join the terrorist groups, you become a blogger.” The prime minister was referring to Zone 9 bloggers among others (Al Jazeera, 2015).

The arrests of Zone 9 bloggers, however, backfired for the Ethiopian government.

The bloggers had established working relations with the international media and human rights organizations prior to the roundups. As a result, in Kassaye’s words, their case instantly gained prominence. “The arrest was a reward. In advocating for our release many started to question the authorities and became increasingly bold. It also motivated many people to follow our path and use social media to demand for change.” The bloggers were released after more than a year in prison.

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The group was later honored with CPJ’s most prestigious International Press

Freedom Awards of 2015 in recognition for “the important role that bloggers play in environments where traditional media are weak or have been all but shuttered by financial hardship and direct or indirect state attacks,” (CPJ, 2015b). Kassaye believes that the bloggers’ role, as well as the wider international calls for their release, helped create awareness. In a way it showed the power of social media in galvanizing the general public and “gave birth to Oromo protest.”

Coordinators Abroad Demonstrators at Home: The Use of Social Media in

#OromoProtests

As stated earlier, between 2008 and 2009 the Ethiopian state passed three proclamations that severely restricted media and civil society to operate. The three laws combined granted the government more power to crash any dissidence. The Oromo

Protests broke out in November 2015 while the country was operating in a stifled media environment.

The Oromo ethnic group, the majority in Ethiopia, occupies the most fertile and central land in the country. Amid growing discontent among Oromos whose land had been sold to foreign developers, the final trigger came with the announcement of the capital Addis Ababa’s masterplan. Authorities announced the expansion of the capital that would incorporate over six Oromia cities. In April 2014, thousands of high school and university students across the Oromia Region turned out in peaceful protests opposing the government’s plans that would displace millions of Oromo farmers and

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residents. Authorities sent in the Ethiopia Special Forces, known as Agazi Commandos.

The special forces began firing indiscriminately and killed scores of peaceful protesters.

Snippets of still images and video clips that showed the brutalities of the state forces were widely circulated on social media and reached the diaspora activists, who greatly amplified the incident (Tibeso, 2014).

As Habtamu Dugo (2017) writes, the opposition’s efforts culminated in a region- wide protest in November 2015 as implementation of the masterplan got under way. The masterplan started to incorporate six adjustment cities and displaced at least 150,000

Oromo farmers. If fully implemented, the plan was projected to displace from 8-10 million Oromia residents (p. 49). Dugo argues that despite different initiatives, political organizations and opposition parties failed to unify the widely shared Oromo discontents.

Hence, the youth took the initiative: “Protesters used new media technologies and tools such as ZTE smartphones, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, websites, blogs and Twitter to share files, photos, audios, videos and texts about crackdown on civilians by police and the military” (2017, p. 49). Dugo adds, “In the absence of international media from the scenes of state led mass killing, at times, protesters were also citizen reporters of events unfolding against them,” (p. 50).

Since the first Ambo Massacre of April 2014, social media and citizen journalism turned the signatures of Oromo protests. As the state gradually became more brutal and banned independent media and access to rights organizations through the CSP

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proclamation, social media remained the only option. Minnesota-based Oromo advocate and social media activist Fatuma Bedhaso explains why:

I think the social media single-handedly changed the political climate of Ethiopia

and the relationship that Ethiopian population, whether in diaspora or back home

had with their governments. Until the recent change, the opposition has followed

the doctrines of armed struggle. But the emergence of social media changed the

landscape and adopted nonviolent movement. This bolstered the movement as

organizers were able to coordinate the youth inside Ethiopia and create links with

organizations and population in the diaspora. They're able to organize, strategize,

plan and effectively challenge the government. Social media changed the power

dynamics of citizens; the dynamics between activists and other organizations that

operated in exile because there wasn't any political or social space that can

operate inside Ethiopia.

Bedhaso adds that social media “brought to light many of the stories that would have never made it to mainstream media or even to public scrutiny” (F. Bedhaso, personal communication, Jan. 31, 2020). Bedhaso’s argument is echoed by others who have covered the protests in the traditional media. German-based Tsedale Lemma is chief editor of the English online magazine Addis Standard, regarded as the most credible outlet. Lemma lists three reasons why social media, particularly Facebook, became virtual spaces for the revolution. The first reason: the diaspora-based organizers of the protest including Jawar Mohammed, Girma Gutema and others were very accessible to

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the young people who were leading the protests on the ground. They became the echo chambers of the protest movement. They would amplify the raw images they received from protestors. Second, accessibility was non-existent for traditional media to report the protests. This gave space to citizen journalism. The third, Lemma states, is because social media became very hard for the government to crack down on. Even the internet blackout did not help as such. “Information tends to leak out somehow,” she says, “even from the most remote areas, because young people were armed with their smartphones. No matter how cheap the smartphones are, the youth were connected using their mobile data.” The government repeatedly resorted to blocking telephone signals in some areas during the protests, but the young people would travel miles to broadcast the protest and share with the activists in the diaspora who would in turn share it to a wider audience (T. Lemma, personal communication, Jan. 24, 2020). As of June 2020, for example, Jawar

Mohammed had more than 1.9 million followers on Facebook. Both with his private

Facebook page and his media outlet, Oromia Media Network (OMN), Mohammed placed himself at the center of the long protest.

#OromoProtests soon gained wider traction. According to BBC, #OromoProtests was among Africa’s top hashtags of 2016 (Williams, 2016). The Ethiopian marathon silver medalist, Feyisa Lilesa, himself an Oromo, also helped grab the cause wider media attention. During the Rio Olympics of 2016, Lilesa crossed his wrists, the symbol of

#OromoProtests, at the finish line. Later he sought asylum in the U.S.A., fearing for his life if he returned to Ethiopia. The athlete told the Associated Press news agency, “If I

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would’ve taken my medal and went back to Ethiopia, that would’ve been the biggest regret of my life,” adding that he “wanted to be a voice for a story that wasn’t getting any coverage” (Graham and Meseret, 2016, para. 5). Lilesa was named among the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in the “challengers” category. “Given the fact that the Olympic Charter bans political propaganda, demonstrations are a rarity at the games. Nevertheless, Ethiopian runner Feyisa Lilesa snubbed the rulebook in order to call attention to the brutal actions of his country’s security forces,” stated the magazine

(Foreign Policy, 2016, para. 1).

For the Canada-based freelance journalist Zecharias Zelalem, for the Oromos, social media served as more than a tool of information sharing and bypassing state imposition. Zelalem reasons that Ethiopia’s state institutions and media never embraced the narratives of other ethnic groups apart from highlanders. Social media, thus, opened up an important platform and enabled marginalized groups such as Oromos to share their plights unfiltered. In the process, it gave them the opportunity for greater understanding of themselves and vis-à-vis the rest (Z. Zelalem, personal communication. Nov. 17,

2019).

Once the Oromo youth began disregarding the state information control en masse, the collective consciousness reached critical mass. Authorities couldn’t observe the growing challenges quietly, and it’s important to see how the state security attempted to quell the mass protests.

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Government Responds: “Hack, Restrict, and Imprison”

Unable to contain the mounting, unfiltered, and unauthorized information flow through the three major legal frameworks it adopted between 2008 and 2009, the

Ethiopian government sought other lethal measures to curtail the growing dissidence.

This subsection deals with how the state had become more belligerent with the declaration of the state of emergency, computer crimes act, and targeting activists aboard who were shaping the protests.

As protests were exponentially growing among the two major ethnic groups, the

Oromos and Amhara, the Ethiopian government declared a six-month state of emergency in October 2016 and later extended it for an additional four months in March 2017 (Allo,

2017). In August and October 2016, during the Oromos’ celebrated Thanksgiving festival, Irreecha, and separate demonstrations, state security killed 1,000 Oromo civilians, of which 700 were killed in one day. This mainly took place in a stampede triggered by gunshots to disperse the protestors. State authorities did not take responsibility (Dagu, 2017, p. 55).

Instead, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn used his U.N. General Assembly time slot in a Sept. 21 speech to outline the dangers of social media. “We are seeing how misinformation could go viral on social media and mislead many people, especially the youth,” said the prime minister. “Social media has certainly empowered populists and other extremists to exploit the people’s genuine concerns and spread their message of

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hate and bigotry without any inhibition.” Hailemariam singled out social media as the main factor for the unrest (Schemm, 2016, para. 4).

To contain the information flow, the government declared a state of emergency that mainly targeted social media. Seven things enacted under the state of emergency included: a) Ban on the use of social media, mainly Facebook and Twitter, to contact

“outside” source; b) Ban on watching diaspora-based satellite TV, mainly Oromia Media

Network (OMN) and Ethiopian Satellite Television Service (ESAT), which were the main outlets that had been amplifying the protests; c) Ban on protests; d) Ban on crossing arms over the head, which was the symbol of #OromoProtests; e) Imposition of a curfew on visiting government institutions between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.; f) 25-mile travel restriction for foreign diplomats; and g) Restriction on carrying guns (BBC, 2016c).

The state of emergency did not prove sufficient to curtail the ever-growing use of social media. In the already beleaguered space, the government implemented the

Computer Crimes Proclamation 958/2016, which according to Hugo, “criminalizes normal freedom of expression and information by subsuming them under overboard and vague terms” (2017, p. 56).

The state of emergency and the four proclamations gave the government unrelenting power to justify abuses. The telecommunication monopoly made it easier for the government to halt telephone services, tap communication, and selectively ban the internet at its whim. All those steps, however, failed to obtain the desired result as authorities had hoped. Hence, the government opted to target activists in the diaspora

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who had been amplifying and spearheading the protest. As will be discussed in the subsequent sections, paying huge amounts of money to pay lobbyists and to hack (social) media activists were the two options taken as final resort.

Paid Lobbyists to Sway International Opinion

As the Oromo and Amhara protests intensified, the Ethiopian government doubled down on its response. All steps taken to block the leaking of information seemed ineffective. Considered as the best ally of the West in the region in the War on Terror,

Ethiopia’s image started to tarnish as it had become difficult to hide the excessive force the government had been exercising.

The freelance journalist Zelalem argues that Ethiopia’s history is characterized by mass killings and blatant abuses of human rights. Until recently, however, all such crimes had been unreported and unheard of outside of the country as the citizens didn’t have an independent voice. Zelalem thinks that the EPRDF administration committed one of the worst crimes in the aftermath of the 2005 elections but managed to hide it. “This was impossible after 2015 when a significant number of the youth were armed with smartphones and cellular data,” he says. “State crimes, institutional atrocities were recorded and transmitted in real-time across the globe. Foreign allies such as Canada,

USA, Sweden, Norway, and others were forced to take a strong stand” (Z. Zelalem, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

On Jan. 21, 2016, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the situation in

Ethiopia. The resolution strongly condemned the Ethiopian government’s excessive use

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of force to clamp down on dissidence. It called E.U. member states to reassess their engagements with the country (European Parliament, 2016).

Meanwhile Ethiopians in the U.S.A. began exerting pressure on their representatives to take a strong stand against the Ethiopian government. While Ethiopian

Americans were working with the U.S. Congress’ Committee of Foreign Affairs to pass a resolution, the Ethiopian government hired a lobbying firm to influence the outcome in its favor.

Activists accessed the contract between the Ethiopian government, signed by its ambassador in the USA, then Mr. Girma Geda, and the lobbying firm. The contract was signed on Jan. 18, 2017 between the Ethiopian government and S.G.R LLC Government

Relations and Lobbying. According to the leaked contract, the firm was expected “to enhance the dialogue and relationships with policymakers, media, opinion leaders, and business leaders. The campaign will promote a better understanding of Ethiopia’s political, social, and economic environment.” As compensation for its service the lobbying firm would be paid $150,000/month and the contract was signed for a year

(S.G.R LLC Government Relations and Lobbying, 2017).

The lobbying firm did not stop the U.S. Congress’ resolution. On Feb. 15, 2017, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 128 on

Ethiopia. The 10-page resolution detailed the abuses committed by the Ethiopian government and condemned it in the strongest terms. The resolution then called on the

Ethiopian government to lift the state of emergency, repeal the controversial

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proclamations, release political prisoners, allow a rapporteur appointed by the United

Nations to conduct independent investigation, etc. (U.S.A. Congress, 2017).

Spending huge money on lobbying firms to improve its images in front of

Western allies didn’t bear the expected result. The state security then took another route to disrupt diaspora activists and drain their sources in Ethiopia. As will be discussed in the next section, it is worth noting how spending more money on hacking transpired, and how successful it was in altering the course of the protests.

Hacking and Targeting Activists in Exile

The Ethiopia state’s proclamations, state of emergency, and lethal response to protests did not deter demonstrators. Realizing the diaspora activists were playing a major role in amplifying the gross abuses committed by the state security, their focus shifted to targeting exiled activists and media outlets.

ESAT and OMN had been among the two most vital satellite TV outlets that were amplifying the raw images they received from demonstrators on the ground. ESAT, linked with the then exiled political party Ginbot 7, until the 2018 reform had been operating from Amsterdam, London, and Washington, D.C. Ginbot 7 had been designated as a terrorist group by the Ethiopian government in 2011. OMN was another prominent media outlet at the forefront of the Oromia protest since its inception in 2014.

OMN was launched to “produce original and citizen-driven reporting on Oromia, the largest and most populous state in Ethiopia,” according to its mission statement. Both

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satellite stations are publicly funded and registered as non-profit organizations (Chala,

2019a).

In February 2017, the Ethiopian prosecutor charged the two most prominent diaspora-based satellite TV stations, OMN and ESAT (Bekele, 2019, p. 10-11). Among other exiled political leaders, OMN Executive Director Jawar Mohammed was charged with terrorism under the controversial Anti-Terror Proclamation. During the state of emergency, OMN and ESAT were the two satellite TV stations that were banned to be watched in Ethiopia. From OMN’s inception in 2014 until at least February 2016, the

Ethiopian authorities reportedly jammed OMN at least 15 times (HRW, 2016). As the protests intensified after the HRW report was published in 2016, one may fairly assume that these jamming attempts continued after the report up until the changes of April

2018.

The state of emergency, harassment and arrests of nationals who either were suspected of having links with the two satellite TV stations and charging their executives in absentia didn’t seem to discourage the growing appetite of citizens to access the banned media outlets. The exercise itself encouraged the youth who were risking their lives to be heard and smuggle out their video clips, which in turn would be broadcast to a larger audience.

Hacking some of the most influential politicians and journalists in exile seemed to be the last resort of Ethiopian security. According to Citizen Lab, the University of

Toronto (Canada) based lab that studies the effect of information control and internet

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surveillance on human rights, Ethiopian state security targeted exiled citizens repeatedly.

According to the findings of the Lab, in December 2013 and November and December

2014, ESAT journalists who were based in Belgium and the U.S. had been attacked with

Remote Control System (RCS) spyware. The research suggests, although the attacks were not successful, in both cases they were launched by Ethiopia’s Information Network

Security Agency (INSA). The spyware was sold to the Ethiopian government by Hacking

Team (HT), a Milan, Italy-based software developer. Remote-Control System (RCS) spyware allows the attackers to see all files, passwords, and communications of the targets. This would eventually help the Ethiopian state security identify sources who continued to feed the network from Ethiopia. The managing director of ESAT, Neamin

Zeleke, was among the targets beside other journalists (Marczak, Scott-Railton &

McKune, 2015). Citizen Lab’s report prompted a media uproar including front-page coverage in The Washington Post (2014) questioning the foreign intervention in U.S. territories and rights groups such as HRW (2014).

In July 2015, Wikileaks unveiled emails from the Italian firm Hack Team. The email leaks confirmed what Citizen Lab had concluded in its findings. Wikileaks files revealed that the Ethiopian state security continued to attack targeted personalities even after the exposé. The leaks show a treasure trove of email exchanges that dated back to

2012 between Hack Team and Biniam Tewolde, INSA’s former deputy chief. In an email dated March 16, 2015, Tewolde emphasized to the Hacking Team that the new target was again Neamin Zeleke, ESAT’s managing director. Hacking Team expressed a reluctance

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to target journalists in a foreign land and mentioned The Washington Post’s report and

HRW’s statement. Tewolde argued that Zeleke was not targeted because of his position in ESAT, but rather as a top leader of Ginbot 7, “a terrorist organization, based on the parliament declaration, trying to terrorize the country, destabilize the country and destroy the constitution of the country” (Wikileaks, 2015).

Whether Hacking Team declined to sell INSA the malicious spyware or went ahead and conducted the attack on ESAT’s Neamin Zeleke is not clear. What Citizen Lab published in its findings in December 2017 is that Ethiopian security continued to target exiled citizens in the UK and USA. The Lab’s findings reveal that “with emails containing sophisticated commercial spyware posing as Adobe Flash updates and PDF plugins,” some Oromo dissidents had been targeted. Cyberbit, an Israel-based cybersecurity company, was the producer of the spyware. As described by the vendor, the spyware is “a comprehensive solution for monitoring and extracting information from remote PCs,” adding that it “eliminat[es] the possibility that the operation will be traced back to the origin.” OMN Executive Director Jawar Mohammed was among the targets of the commercial spyware. Other prominent figures from the Oromo ethnic group who either regularly appeared on OMN or other international media outlets as expert witnesses were targeted, too. The attacks were carried out from 2016 until the time of the report was published, December 2017 (Marczak, Alexander, McKune, Scott-Railton, &

Deibert, 2017).

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Due to his huge influence with his satellite TV station or through a big following on Facebook, the Minneapolis-based Mohammed was targeted repeatedly. During the long #OromoProtests, Mohammed served as the guru who would guide street protests, solicit funds and amplify the raw images he received from protesters on the ground. The reports by Citizen Lab did not indicate if his devices had been compromised. However, the Ethiopian state security kept trying to mitigate his influence. It is not clear if

Facebook acted after receiving petitions from the Ethiopian government and supporters but was suspended repeatedly at the height of the big demonstrations. On March 7, 2018,

Mohammed tweeted: “I have been held incommunicado by @facebook for 16 hours now.

This is the 4th time they have blocked me in two weeks. I am now certain that this is a deliberate act to silence me from reporting about the crisis in Ethiopia. Fb is not acting alone either,” (Mohammed, 2018a). As he indicated in his tweets, other times he was blocked on Facebook for “going too fast," which happens if someone posts many items per day. That was an understandable occurrence during the heights of the demonstrations.

The effects of continued state-sponsored cyberattacks targeting diaspora-based media and figures is worth assessing. Whether such attacks managed to deter activists or their sources at home or backfired will be dealt in the next section.

Activists Double Down their Attacks

Both reports of Citizen Lab do not mention whether devices of the most prominent targets, mainly Mohammed and Zeleke, had been compromised. However, at

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least through Israel-produced commercial spyware, some of the targets were hit

(Marczak, Alexander, McKune, Scott-Railton, & Deibert, 2017). There have not been any reports that indicate contacts in Ethiopia suffered negative attention due to information accessed from the devices of the diaspora activists.

Despite the Ethiopian government’s massive resources, activists easily outmaneuvered it. Not only were they cautious of the repeated attempts, but rather activists took their own proactive steps to wage cyberattack against the country’s top political leaders. In an interview with Addis Standard after his return to Ethiopia in

August 2018, Mohammed dismissed the INSA, the country’s information network behind all the hacks, as “incompetent and ineffective.” He added, “They were trying to hack us; we used to hack them. They were really vulnerable,” (Sileshi, 2018, para. 20).

Since November 2017, diaspora activists had been accessing various classified documents, minutes of secret meetings, personal emails of prominent state officials, and private exchanges between security personnel. How the trove of files ended up in the hands of activists could not be ascertained. However, this considerably damaged the reputation of the EPRDF administration.

Among the leaked documents was one revealing TPLF’s (the Tigray region’s political party and the de-facto leader of the EPRDF coalition) paid bloggers. Those bloggers had been appearing in international media as independent journalists. The leaked document listed 13 “social media commentators” and their job titles, and indicated that they got paid $300 per month, on top of their regular government salaries, as many

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were already on the state payroll. By Ethiopia’s standard – where the average per capita

GDP in 2017 was $768.40 according to World Bank (2017) – the incentive was substantial. The social media commentators were expected to advance the party line and counter messaging from diaspora-based activists. Some “brave soldiers” such as Daniel

Berhane were getting paid $600 per article according to the leaked document (Chala,

2018a). Daniel Berhane of Horn Affairs and Dawit Kebede of Awarmba Times were prominent bloggers. Horn Affairs had more than 100,000 followers on Facebook as of

April 2020, although its credibility diminished after the leak. Both were among guests who would frame their views as coming from independent journalists inside the country.

Prior to the leak, the bloggers, particularly the likes of Berhane, had carried huge influence. According to the Canada-based journalist Zelalem, among the international correspondents and diplomats, they had been consulted as experts and analysts. This privilege ended after it was revealed that they are paid lobbyists (Z. Zelalem, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

PhD student at UCLA Ayantu Ayana, an Oromo activist, says the damages of the paid bloggers was not limited to social media. With them being young people with easy access to foreign correspondents in Ethiopia, “the biggest impact they had was when providing the correspondents, a very skewed perspective of what's going on. And then

Western journalists, for lack of knowledge, lack of access or maybe laziness end up regurgitating the TPL’s perspectives. That was the most frustrating thing in the early days of the protests” (A. Ayana, personal communication, Jan. 29, 2020).

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Five weeks after the leak had been widely discussed, hackers started sharing screenshots of Facebook chats between high level-intelligence officers furiously discussing who could have leaked the document. Another leaked document showed a money order to be paid to two members of the intelligence agency INSA to be sent to

China for special training (Chala, 2018a). While the document did not indicate the type of training, social media activists had their guesses.

A member of the Zone 9 bloggers, Kassaye believes that for many Ethiopians the identities of the paid bloggers and social media influencers were not hard to discern. For example, before 2014, she argues, social media was a collaborative space. When the government realized its influence and started to invest heavily into that arena, it turned into a toxic space where it was difficult to discuss issues. Through training by Chinese tech companies, Kassaye believes, the Ethiopian government recruited thousands of average civil servants whose task was to disrupt any conversation on social media and redirect it to mundane exchanges (E. Kassaye, personal communication, Nov. 19, 2019).

Kassaye’s colleague and co-founder of the Zone 9 bloggers, Endalkachew Chala (2019b) corroborates her assertion: “EPRDF was able to actively use social media to mobilize support, spread disinformation and attack opponents... In fact, the true precursor for the current dizzying disinformation swirling Ethiopian social media began back in 2014”

(para. 38).

The infighting among TPLF’s leadership helped exiled activists. A trove of hacked emails and a search of 10 years’ worth of data from the browser of TPLF’s

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chairperson Debretsion Gebremichael were dumped online. The leak seemed to be a deliberate act of sabotage by one or more high-ranking excommunicated officials who had been trying to retaliate. The digital footprints of the country’s most powerful man showed he had been using state-sponsored trips and funds to prey on sex-workers and escorts whenever he traveled to Cairo, Yaoundé, Bangkok, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Geneva,

Seoul, Busan, Mumbai, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Las Vegas. His addiction to watching pornography and forcing young and married employees of his office into sex with him was exposed. The chairperson’s hacked emails had revealed his corrupt schemes such as embezzling state funds and awarding dubious contracts worth more than one billion of

Ethiopian birr (more than $30 million usd) to Chinese and German telecom companies

(Gellaw, 2018).

The EPRDF coalition had been accusing the diaspora media activists of collusion with foreign entities and charged many with terrorism. The leaked and hacked files put into serious question the moral authority for the state officials to blame the exiled activists as they had been accusing them for years. Similarly, it ended the fiction that paid bloggers and social media commentators were independent experts, which of course also ended their effectiveness.

Information Slowed, but not Stopped

As discussed in the previous sections, the state security apparatus had tried different means to disrupt communications of the activists. On top of the routine harassments and arbitrary arrests, social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and

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WhatsApp a few times had been blocked in Ethiopia. From 2016 until the political change of 2018, the internet was closed five times in the entire country under the pretexts of national security, quelling protests, and exam cheating (Ayalew, 2019).

Social media activists in the diaspora contend their work had been slowed but not totally blocked. Ayana was in Ethiopia between 2015 and 2016 since the first Oromo protests broke out. While staying in the capital, Addis Ababa, there was no way she could get information from local or international media outlets. Therefore, she had to constantly check social media as that was the only way she could learn about developments. The state then took the severe measure of banning most social media apps. It did not take long for the tech-savvy youth to circumvent the ban through Virtual Private Network (VPN).

She says that was the first time she had heard of VPN. While staying in Ethiopia, she was able to access her social media apps via VPN.

When Ayana returned to the USA in 2016, thanks to the network she had established in her visit and her active engagements in the Oromo cause, she continued to receive regular updates. “I noticed activists back home are very deliberate about what they are doing in terms of getting information out. They send information out to their friends in the diaspora because they know their friends in the diaspora will post them and can post them with little repercussions.” She adds that many in the Oromo diaspora are people who left the country for political reasons. Their relatives are likely to be very politically conscious, to follow the events and report to them. “And of course, in the diaspora, between 2014 and 2018 we were constantly exchanging information, constantly

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updating each other. There are so many WhatsApp groups, so many Facebook groups, so many different email threads where people are reporting what's happening in different parts of Oromia,” (A. Ayana, personal communication, Jan. 229, 2020).

Other diaspora activists who had been amplifying the #OromoProtests maintain that despite the initial difficulties due to the government crackdown, the state of emergency backfired and triggered many to defy it. Minnesota-based Oromo advocate

Bedhaso reasons:

It was like throwing gasoline on a fire because they were arresting notable

activists for just posting anything on Facebook. Not necessarily anything that

warrants a crime. I think at that point everybody started to say it's now or never. If

you're going to be in prison, if you're going to be locked up for Facebook posts,

many thought they would rather defy the ban totally. I think it did the exact

opposite, because more people got involved. People became angry and their

children were literally getting picked up one by one. Some people were having to

fetch two kids at once. Other people were having to search for their children

because they're picked up. They're put in camps, in torture chambers. I think what

it did was the exact opposite of what the government intended. (F. Bedhaso,

personal communication, Jan. 31, 2020)

Having become inured to the government’s intolerance to dissidence, Zelalem says, diaspora media outlets initially had established contacts in most conflict zones.

Despite repeated attempts, he continues, even though the state controlled the

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telecommunications, it was unable to manage the massive outflow of SMS messages to contacts in the diaspora. Until September 2017, Ethiopia’s telecom was not registering names of sim card holders, which made it difficult even for the state to track down the communications. Zelalem says that most media outlets that covered the protests and the organizers in the diaspora were able to improvise and adjust quickly to the countermeasures being applied by the government. Thanks to the dedicated and resilient youth who were making many sacrifices to be heard, according to Zelalem, the news cycle, particularly during the total internet blackout, was slowed but never halted (Z.

Zelalem, personal communication, Nov. 17, 2019).

Protests spread nationwide, mainly in the Oromia and Amhara regions. As the youth gained momentum, activists from the diaspora simultaneously continued exerting pressure. The outcome of massive pressure and how it transpired was a turning point.

Qeerroos’ Victory; Quick Clampdown

Various measures, including lethal responses from state security, failed to subdue the Oromo protests. The Oromo youth who called themselves "Qeerroo," an Oromo term meaning "bachelor" that was adopted to symbolize the gallant demonstrators, were unstoppable. Since the end of 2015 the qeerroos, later joined by the Amhara youth, the second-largest ethnic-group, organized hundreds of demonstrations, blocked roads, and eventually paralyzed the economy. As stated by National Public Radio (NPR) (2018), the demonstrations crippled the fast-growing economy of the country, which led to a 20 percent decrease in direct foreign investment.

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Amid mounting pressure from the international community and unable to contain the ever-growing dissent, the government was finally brought to heel. In February 2018,

Prime Minister Hailermairiam Desalegn announced his resignation. After internal deliberations, the ruling coalition, EPRDF, elected Abiy Ahmed, an ethnic Oromo, as a new prime minister in April 2018.

Ahmed introduced quick changes, releasing thousands of political prisoners, lifting the state of emergency, inviting back all the exiled political parties, and accepting the Ethio-Eritrean boundary commission’s final decision, that would end the 20-year deadlock between the two countries. In his second address to the parliament on June 18,

2018, Ahmed declared that his government no longer would block and censor the media.

Four days later, his then chief of staff in a tweet announced that the government “has opened access to 264 blocked websites/bloggers/ ESAT and OMN (Arega, 2018).

Qeerroos who had risked their lives against live ammunitions were credited for the change. Coordinators in exile also played an immense role in the revolution.

Minnesota-based Jawar Mohammed, who had been charged with terrorism, was among the key figures. “We used social media and formal media so effectively that the state was completely overwhelmed,” Mohammed told The Guardian newspaper. “The only option they had was to face reform or accept full revolution.” Mohammed was the central figure who propelled the once-marginalized political position of Oromo to the mainstream.

Through his media outlet, OMN, and his major social media campaigns, in collaboration with other outlets, he challenged the brutal security apparatus (Gardner, 2018).

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In August 2018, Mohammed returned to Ethiopia after 10 years. He was received like royalty when tens of thousands of supporters from all over the Oromia Region drove hours and flooded the streets to welcome him. In his first two-week visit, he conducted 20 to 30 meetings a day. In Ambo, the epicenter of the protest, Mohammed

“took off his shoes and walked prophet-like through the streets of the city. He then planted a tree at the site where a young man was killed by security forces nearly 15 years ago, long before the rise of the movement that threw him into the national spotlight”

(Gardner, 2018, para. 11th).

Other prominent Oromo activists whose roles had been similar to that of

Mohammed returned, too. Founding editor of Oromia Pride (Opride.com), Mohammed

Ademo, penned a piece for Al Jazeera English recounting why he was returning home after 16 years of exile: “to witness firsthand how my country is undergoing massive change which was unthinkable just a few months ago” (Ademo, 2018).

Exiled activists and political parties were invited. Social media had reportedly contributed in disregarding the state’s information monopoly. With regard to the dramatic changes in the first few months of Ahmed’s ascension to power, it is important to study what role social media played.

First Casualty of Social Media in Post-reform

Ahmed quickly introduced major reforms that undid his political party’s long rule.

He released thousands of political prisoners and closed the most notorious prison, Kalitiy,

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where prisoners of conscience had been held. At his first anniversary in office, the

Committee to Protect Journalists (2019) reported:

Ethiopia, which was one of the most-censored countries in the world and one of

the worst jailers of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, has gone through dramatic

reforms under the leadership of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who took office last

April. In 2018 – for the first time in 14 years – CPJ recorded no journalists behind

bars in its annual census. (para. 3)

When exiled politicians and banned political parties, including armed groups, were invited and their charges dropped, social media continued to be the main source of information and repeatedly triggered violence. Ahmed’s very quick reforms were accompanied by a sudden loosening up of the security apparatus, a development that led to violence. It started with an assassination attempt of Ahmed himself during his first rally in the capital on June 23, 2018. A grenade was tossed at Ahmed, which left one dead and more than 150 injured (Dwyer, 2018).

On Aug. 12, 2018, thousands gathered in a town called Shashemene to welcome

Jawar Mohammed. The jubilant atmosphere took the life of one innocent citizen as a result of fake news spread on social media. A mob lynched that person, who had been driving in the crowd, as a Facebook post had claimed the person was carrying a bomb to throw at the gathering. Without examining the Facebook post, supporters quickly acted, burned the car and lynched the person. Later it was revealed that the car belonged to the

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city’s admin and was on regular patrol duty and never carried a bomb. The victim was an innocent employee of the city (Addis Standard, 2018).

The next day Mohammed (2018b) posted on his Facebook condemning the mob attack as “disgusting and cruel” and went on to shed light on the difficulties of the ongoing transition:

Let me repeat what I have been saying for the past few months. When a country

moves from authoritarianism to democracy, rule of guns gives away to rule of

law. We are now in that transition where [the] rule of gun has been defeated and

rule of law is yet to take roots. That is a vacuum where lawlessness and anarchy

lurks. I sensed that from far before and now I am witnessing it to be even more

serious. That’s why I have been appealing to the youth to help stabilize the

country chiefly by letting police deal with suspects rather than the youth trying to

arrest and punish whomever they suspect. While appealing to the youth to calm

down things is important, it’s essential the government and the opposition work

together to speed up the transition to democracy so that the vacuum will be filled

by rule of law. Reaction to events is understandable but only proactive actions by

all stakeholders can help us avoid further death and destruction.

Violence, mainly interethnic, continued. Social media continued to play a central role in either triggering or fueling it. For example, in what state authorities blamed on social media, in September 2018 scores of incidents involving ethnic violence occurred.

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Much of this took place when former armed rebels returned home, leaving their Eritrean base after hearing the call of Ahmed’s wider amnesty (Abraha, 2018).

A few months into Ahmed’s tenure, 1.4 million Ethiopians had been displaced.

Due to the mass unrests, interethnic conflicts and lootings, between December 2018 and

April 2020, HMW (2020) reported 2.89 million displaced Ethiopians. Although social media cannot be blamed for such a large-scale crisis, in most cases, it played a negative role in widening the interethnic rift. One would naturally ask why the high expectations quickly faded? Social media’s role in the growing internal rift is worth discussing.

Multiple Interest Groups Competing for Scant Resources and Deferred Promises

Ahmed’s high expectations, wider amnesty, and mainly Oromo’s demands were not addressed. This was further exacerbated by growing influencers who had higher stakes despite little resources. Some of the exiled activists, such as Mohammed Ademo, who had hoped to be part of the change returned to their places of exile. Others stayed.

Activists such as Jawar Mohammed continued to enjoy high influence and informal power. Ahmed’s government seemed unhappy with such decentralized power.

After his return from Norway having received his Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 11, 2019

Ahmed told his parliament that some media owners were stirring up unrest in Ethiopia.

Although he did not mention Mohammed by name, the prime minister said, “The media owners who do not have Ethiopian passports are playing both ways. When there is peace, you are playing here, and when we are in trouble, you are not here.” He further warned

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that his government would take measures if such elements seem to be undermining the peace (Al Jazeera, 2019c).

The prime minister’s speech kicked off a feud between his government and the media mogul Mohammed. While tensions were brewing, on Oct. 21, 2019, Mohammed posted on his Facebook page in Afaan Oromo, Amharic, and English claims that his personal security had been asked to leave at midnight without notifying him. According to the post, the bodyguards refused and woke him up. When he tried to call the authorities, they failed to give him a satisfactory explanation. He thus took the matter in his own hands and posted on his Facebook, with more than 1.75 million followers at that time:

Now it appears the plan was not to arrest me. The plan was to remove my security

and unleash civilian attackers and claim it was a mob attack. I tend to believe this

because a) I am now informed that talk of removing my security so that my

adversaries can 'teach me lesson' was discussed privately in some circles b) There

has been strange mob type conflict in the city in the last few days including one

not far from where I live just about an hour before they tried to remove security

from my house. Who is behind all this? Time will tell.

Qeerroos were mobilized by Mohammed’s post and flocked in hundreds to his residence to protect him. The post sparked a chain of reactions across Ethiopia. In a clash with the state security at his place of residence, at least 19 people were killed. The protests spread across the Oromia Region leading to an open confrontation with the state

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security. Qeerroos started burning copies of Abiy Ahmed’s newly released book

Medemer (2019) demanding in chants that he step down immediately. Finally, Jawar

Mohammed asked his supporters to calm down. At least 86 people were killed and more than 200 injured during the protest that went on for three days (Ibrahim & Siad, 2019;

Chala, 2019b).

The police chief, however, had denied Mohammed’s allegation of removing his security guards. Prime Minister Ahmed later reiterated the law enforcement’s statement that they wouldn’t have provided him personal security in the first place if they had wanted him to be attacked by a mob. But the incident triggered an uproar on social media from supporters, and Mohammed’s opponents argued that he should face trial for his false allegations and the resulting havoc (Hussien, 2019).

It is not only Mohammed’s Facebook post that had sparked violence. As

Edlkachew Chala (2019b) a scholar and former blogger who had extensively reported on

Ethiopia’s social media engagement, believes, most of the interethnic divisions and polarizing views were expressed and fueled through social media. With some deliberately made misleading claims while others fabricated stories, social media posts triggered many conflicts. The political culture of the EPRDF ruling coalition exacerbated the trend.

“The party is entangled in a deadly and incessant power struggle, mostly along ethnic lines among its four members; supporters and members of each ethnic party are taking their fight to social media,” argues Chala, adding that the internal battle had been

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characterized by “by leaking embarrassing stories to opposition media outlets that add fuel to the ongoing misinformation” (paras. 10-11).

Social Media’s “Exact Reverse” Roles in Post-change

Ahmed came to power thanks to sustained demands amplified through social media. It is important to examine how the changes transpired on the ground since April

2018. This section will assess how social media was (mis)used in sustaining the long- awaited change.

“Social media has been playing the exact reverse roles since Abiy Ahmed came to power,” says Lemma, chief editor of the online magazine Addis Standard. Among some of the reasons, Lemma explains, was the sudden relaxing of the security apparatus and sabotage from interests within the system who wanted to discredit the change. Human

Rights Watch in its April 2020 report underlined similar points: “These developments occurred in the context of a weakened administrative and security apparatus at the federal, regional, and local levels, creating security voids in many locations and contributing to the delayed response or inaction of government forces to contain outbreaks of violence” (2020, para. 13).

According to Lemma, the loosening of the security apparatus opened space for horizontal violence. Before the change, journalists were afraid of the security officials as the risks of being thrown into jail were high. After the opening, power has been handed to the mob. “The horizontal attack is very valid and violent. My journalists have felt threatened by the cyber-attack, the way that they have never felt threatened in pre-Abiy.

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There were times when journalists told me they can't cover particularly stories in fear of horizontal violence perpetuated through social media,” says Lemma, “Journalists feel less safe from the impact of this acrimonious social media and its cyber lynching attacks. We feel less safe today than we were in pre-Abiy. And this is because of social media” (T.

Lemma, personal communication, Jan. 24, 2020).

The highly anticipated political change, the abolition of the pervasive online and offline censorship, helped spur the widening of the inter-ethnic divisions. Conspiracy theories to inflammatory rhetoric to hate speech enabled through Live Facebook and

YouTube channels started to fill the vacuum. There is a huge audience who readily accepts and is quick to react to the messages spread by influential social media personalities (Chala, 2019c).

Dog-whistling on social media, the use of coded and suggestive language to trigger an audience reaction, was another trend that followed the political reforms.

Politicians suddenly found Facebook Live and decentralized social platforms more effective than the regular channels of communication. This helped stoke further violence.

One such incident, on June 22, 2019, took the lives of at least three senior state officials.

In what the government described as a “failed coup attempt,” the then security chief of the Amhara Region, Gen. Asamnew Tsige, orchestrated two attacks in his region and the capital, Addis Ababa. Amhara’s state president Ambachew Mekonnen and his advisor were killed in an attack in the region’s capital, Bahir Dar. Several hours later, in coordinated attacks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s chief of staff, General Seare Mekonnen,

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and another retired general were killed at his home by Gen. Mekonnen’s bodyguard. The alleged mastermind of the attack, General Tsige, was killed as well. A week before the attack, General Tsige had called the Amhara youth to arm themselves and be ready to defend. He made his call through Facebook (Voice of America, 2019).

In a polarizing environment, weighing the outreach, many influential personalities and politicians used social media to communicate their messages. Among the young and aspiring politicians who have big followers, social media had turned into a platform for dog-whistling. As Chala (2019d) writes, aspiring politicians used coded language, sarcasm, or even deliberately vague statements that would lead to multiple interpretations. Such subtle posts stoked interethnic divisions, going viral with thousands of shares among the tens of thousands of followers and resulted in heated discussions. In the already tattered political space, polarizing views and dog-whistling created further divisions (Chala, 2019d). State authorities resorted to partially or totally blocking the internet as had happened following other major incidents.

The growing dog-whistle trend and polarizing, inflammatory rhetoric carry other consequences. Media practitioners believe that are under increasing pressure to follow suit and cannot live up to those expectations. Lemma describes the new reality traditional media are facing as between a rock and hard place:

This negative aspect is not only hurtful to the communities on the ground; it is

also squeezing the mainstream media, since the mainstream media is not running

loose as the social media. There are layers of scrutiny before a story makes it into

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a story and you'd have to take your time to verify things. But social media is

already on it and "facts" are established in the world of social media. If your story

is not in-tandem and confirming those inflammatory "facts;" you get squeezed,

you get vilified, you get cyber lynched. (T. Lemma, personal communication, Jan.

24, 2020).

It is not only Lemma who has grown wary of social media use in the period following Ahmed’s ascension to power. With very low media literacy coupled with multiple state and non-state actors harnessing social media, Kassaye fears the negative effects may outweigh the positive. With social media influencers such as Mohammed whose one tweet or Facebook post can impact the lives of many, she argues that unless handled carefully, social media will deliver far worse consequences. Zelalem validates her line of thinking and reasons that the single narrative the entire population has got used does not suit with a wide array of social media information sharing nature. “When people are accustomed to a single narrative that has been long cultivated through schools, family and the state, they are not accustomed to such flows and are not even trained to discern. So, it will take time and efforts to build a political culture that cherishes diverse and opposing views. Ethiopians will learn to choose their sources,” says Zelalem, as he further explains her concerns. “I feel that social media will still play a rather devastating role in worsening some of the tribal conflicts that we see in the country. I'm not being a pessimist, but just a realist,” (Z. Zelalem, personal communication. Nov. 17, 2019).

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Activists and journalists criticize Abiy Ahmed’s leadership for adopting some of the same mechanisms as his predecessors. Like the TPLF’s paid bloggers and social media commentators, some of the staffers of the prime minister's office have been using social media to counter and at times attack critics. When the Addis Standard published a sharp editorial after Ahmed won the Peace Nobel Prize, his cheerleaders began targeting its chief editor, Tsedale Lemma, herself an ethnic Oromo. As Lemma tells it, she has been accused of “using her polished English to spew venom and destroy the country.”

Lemma’s personal info was mentioned in a Facebook post that drew hundreds of comments and dozens of shares. Some of the commentators asked for her photo. Then she started receiving hate messages and threats. She notes that such attacks have been common where media professionals feel less safe from the impact of acrimonious social media posts and its cyber lynching attacks (T. Lemma, personal communication, January

24, 2020).

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Chapter 5: The Use of Sudanese Social Media in Helping to Unseat 30-year-old

Regime

The previous chapters have tried to demonstrate how social media has been playing crucial roles in challenging the Eritrean state hegemony and facilitating change in

Ethiopia. This chapter will assess the role social media played in bringing down Omar

Hassen al-Bashir’s 30-year regime. It will first deal with how Bashir’s regime has long silenced any forms of dissidence in the country. Then the chapter will show how the huge

Sudanese diaspora, which has been exerting pressure from afar, was able to unify the scattered demands into a single cause. As dealt in the findings, the December Revolution resulted from a long process by different groups that had been actively working for years to unseat the regime. Hence, the chapter will show the phases and developments that culminated in the regime’s ousting. With emphasis on the role of social media, it will deal with how Sudanese nationals across different spectrums managed to circumvent and then challenge the feared state security apparatus.

Exiled but Always Tied to Sudan

In June 1989, the Sudanese National Islamic Front (NIF) led by Brig. Gen. Omar

Hassan al-Bashir ousted the democratically elected, civilian government of Prime

Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and President Ahmed al-Mirghani. For the next 30 years, Bashir ushered Sudan through a series of civil wars, genocides, and hostile living conditions that resulted in many Sudanese nationals into exile (Ibrahim, 2006).

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The continuous outflow of nationals has resulted in the gelling of an effective opposition from the outside. German-based Sudanese scholar and blogger Magdi el-

Gizouli cites a long history of diaspora opposition by people who left the country for political and economic reasons after 1989. The main opposition were mainly based in neighboring countries such as Eritrea, Uganda, Kenya, and Egypt. In the West, particularly in the U.K. and U.S.A., activists have been involved in lobbying through their representatives.

Different opposition groups continued to exert pressure on the Sudanese government. Al-Bashir’s government, however, endured the growing opposition for a long time. While earlier opposition efforts employed traditional resistance tactics, radical improvements in communication technologies have strengthened the opposition. Social media, both in communication and building consensus, was a game changer, as el-

Gizouli explains. When WhatsApp became encrypted and free of charge (apart from an internet connection), that had a transformative effect on how people communicate and organize both inside Sudan and in the diaspora. Drawing from his personal experience as a former member of the banned Sudan Communist Party, el-Gizouli reflects:

My generation had to meet physically to get anything done. And people who are

mobilizing up from 2014-15 did not need to physically meet anymore. I

personally operated on the ground and did things in the dark of night with people

that you had to trust, and you had to know personally, but the WhatsApp group

didn't really need this sort of security paranoia. It's a much more open space, and

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it allowed the level of mobilization that was not possible for my generation

because it allowed people to mobilize at the level of neighborhoods. (M. el-

Gizouli, personal communication, Feb. 2, 2020).

While the diaspora has been exerting pressure from outside, young people inside the country, who were brought up under al-Bashir’s regime, continued to push against the regime despite serious setbacks (Howard, 2019). Popular uprisings in the MENA region have added impetus to the young Sudanese population, particularly among college students. University students have historically played a positive role in challenging

Sudanese military rulers who have been ousted from power through popular revolt.

Khartoum University students helped topple Ibrahim ‘Abboud in 1964 and Ja‘far al-

Numayri in 1985. With increasing state intervention and the state security’s watchful eyes, during al-Bashir’s repressive times various groups have been organizing underground. Those underground organizations tried to open space for secular thinking.

Among such student-driven initiatives that initially came as resistance to the increasing

Islamization of the school curriculum and leadership were Girifna (“We Are Fed Up”) and Sudan Change Now in 2009 and 2010, respectively (Medani, 2013).

Girifna and Sudan Change Now are important as both were founded inside Sudan and advocate for nonviolent struggle. As the only means of expressing dissent during al-

Bashir’s regime was underground, both the youth-centered organizations depended on social media to disseminate their messages and shed light on the abysmal state.

According to the mission statement on their website (2009), “Girifna is a grassroots

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movement that is motivated by the nonviolent direct-action ideals of Ghandi, Martin

Luther King, and other non-violent and peaceful uprisings throughout the world.” The organization further explained that overthrowing the National Congress Party (NCP) regime by force would lead to another, worse dictatorial regime. Regarding its means of communication, the grassroots movement proclaimed, “Since the beginning of the movement, Girifna has emphasized utilizing technology and new media, including

Facebook and creating a website. Girifna communicates through on-line chats, emails, and skype meetings,” adding that it produced songs, poems, music videos and other similar contents “to spread its message and educate the general public beyond the confines of Khartoum, or even Sudan, to a much larger global audience, including the

Sudanese diaspora.”

Sudan Change Now (SCN), like Girifna, was founded by young university students who advocated for nonviolent struggle. It was an umbrella of underground movements that sought to unite the different political factions and movements that were aiming to push out Bashir’s regime. As active members of SCN were mainly young people, they were easily able to connect with the disenfranchised youth of Sudan.

Composed of mainly middle-class young people, as Medani describes, the group used a

"high-tech communication tools to voice their grievances against the regime, as well as their criticisms of the older generation of politicians and increasingly marked ethnic and racial divisions in society" (Medani, 2013, para. 13).

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As internal, youth-driven movements were surging, Bashir’s regime fortified its trenches. To suppress the growing resistance, the state passed the National Security Act in 2010 that gave the Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) unlimited authority to conduct surveillance and arbitrarily detain suspects up to four/five months without due process of law. As UNHCR Canada (2016) documented, SCN was among the first casualties of the sweeping 2010 act. About 100 members of the organization were detained and later made to report to the security office daily; two women members were sexually assaulted in order to shame them; key figures were tortured, and many were expelled from their jobs. As documented on the organization’s website, Girifna’s members were frequently harassed and persecuted by the former regime’s security police. One woman, a member, was gang-raped by the security police while others were forced to flee the country for their safety (Girifna, 2009).

The state security worked to reduce SCN’s influence. As a formerly active member of SCN now in exile, Husam Osman Mahjoub and current spokesperson of the organization Mohammed Ameen recall, the underground movement was behind the

September 2013 protest. Prior to the September demonstration, SCN had established its name and built trust among the Sudanese people for its major groundwork during the

August 2013 flood crisis in the capital, Khartoum. This flood crisis coincided with a major event. Through its usual rumor mill channels, the government started to float reports of a planned cut of subsidies; SCN began organizing a demonstration in reaction,

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mainly through social media (M. Ameen, personal communication, Jan. 13, 2020; H. O.

Mahjoub, personal communication, Jan. 17, 2020).

According to the HRW (2013) report, the protest started in Wad Madani on Sept.

23, 2013, a day after the state announced a cut of subsidies in fuel. It quickly spread to other towns and cities such as Khartoum, Omdurman, and Port Sudan, where protesters turned violent and state security responded using tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Amnesty International reported that more than 200 people were killed by the state security police while more than 700 people got arrested in connection with the protest (Sudan Tribune, 2013.)

According to Ameen, although SCN used to appear publicly and do outreach work, following the post-demonstration crackdown, the organization changed its mode of resistance. “We have changed our techniques to work simultaneously on many levels; of course, social media was one of our most preferred fields, for security reasons. So we mainly depended on the social media Facebook and Twitter,” says the spokesperson.

While activists have returned to social media to organize and challenge the state narrative, Bashir’s government was equally invested in neutralizing the growing resistance facilitated via social media. Following early signs of the popular uprising in the

MENA region, the state security established “Cyber Jihadist Unit/Electronic Jihad.”

Social media activists referred to them as “electronic Jidad” (meaning “electronic chicken”). Reporters Without Borders describes, “Sudanese intelligence agency-run troll army spies on activists, politicians and journalists on social media. It also disseminates

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messages and articles with false information designed to discredit members of the current transitional government and defend leading members of the old regime” (2020, para. 25).

The Long Struggle of Sudanese Diaspora in Challenging Bashir’s Regime

In an op-ed piece for The New Internationalist, under the title “Building protest in

Sudan,” el-Gizouli (2012b) outlined the three possible sources of challenge to Bashir’s regime:

an urban underclass struggling to eke out a living under adverse economic

conditions; students and young professionals frustrated by the patriarchal lid on

their political ambitions; and second-generation diaspora Sudanese tweeting for

the homeland. Communication between the three constituencies is at best

troubled, often requiring the mediation of an interpreter. The government’s

security apparatus has ridiculed the fluent English-speakers of the third category

as online ghosts and sought to contain the second with volleys of teargas, rubber

bullets and streamed passage through its detention centers. The first, however,

were received with live ammunition. (para. 4)

The December 2018 Revolution that ousted the 30-year old regime combined the three forces el-Gizouli mentioned. This arguably resulted from the cumulative effects of the 30-year resistance against Bashir's National Congress Party regime by different

Sudanese forces. Among these various forces, the role of Sudanese diaspora professionals was noteworthy.

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The generation that left Sudan when Bashir came to power in 1989 had been looking for ways to exert pressure on the regime. In the absence of viable media, some websites were solely used by people in the Sudanese diaspora to debate and discuss issues. Khalid Albaih, a Doha-based prominent Sudanese artist and political cartoonist, believes the second generation of Sudanese diaspora played a major role. Albaih was born in Romania and raised in Qatar, as his parents went into exile after the 1989 coup.

Those brought up in the Gulf countries or the West, with better educational opportunities, realized the need to act. “A huge percentage of them work in very sensitive positions and are very educated. They knew how to lobby, whether it's in the U.S. or whether it's in the

U.N. or other organizations. I think what really played a huge part was the involvement of the second generation of the Sudanese diaspora. Not only online because I think online was great and the campaigns were great, but I think the lobbying played a huge part in pushing these campaigns” (K. Albaih, personal communication, Jan. 15, 2019.)

“Sudanese diaspora activism is not new,” Fadlalla (2019, para. 5) maintains.

During the Sudanese civil war that finally led to the separation of South Sudan, the war on Darfur of 2005, and other major events, people in the Sudanese diaspora mobilized in their international arenas. Over time activists learned to narrow their differences: “While previous activism was framed around divisive identity politics, ethnic and religious belonging, the current revolution confirms that dealing with questions of equal citizenship rights in the Sudan need not split the nation further along gender, ethnic, and racial lines” (para. 6).

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As Isma'il Kushkush (2019a) writes in Quartz Africa, Bashir managed to secure strong regional enemies. The West’s fear of creating a power vacuum in the area played to his advantage, too. From outside, the only group that exerted pressure and invested all its resources into removing the regime was the Sudanese diaspora, estimated at about five million people.

Participants of this research elaborated on the many facets of the Sudanese diaspora’s role. Amplifying the muzzled voices of the Sudanese nationals inside the country was one important contribution. Due to the various measures taken by Bashir’s regime, since the international community and media lacked access, citizens inside Sudan did not have a means to share their plight. Hence, the diaspora would collect information through family connection and other informal channels that bypassed the security’s measures. Images, clips and firsthand accounts were presented on different platforms.

This shined a light on Sudanese repression that the regime had always sought to conceal.

Sudanese nationals in the diaspora filled the information gap and continued to feed

NGOs, rights groups, and stakeholders with information. For example, The Sudanese

Doctors Central Committee, a professional association founded in exile, provided data and images of casualties during the protests. As Abdulrazig S. Hummaida and Khalid M.

Dousa (2019), both exiled Sudanese medical doctors, write, while Sudanese state media had downplayed the number of injuries and deaths during protests, the Sudanese Doctors

Central Committee continued to report the actual numbers of casualties and fatalities on their social media accounts.

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As the Sudanese diaspora became the point of contact for amplifying the crisis transpiring inside the country, it played a vital role in mobilizing international pressure.

The media blackout was primarily bypassed through the diaspora. Although the Arabic media had relative good access and familiarity, chiefly among the English-speaking world access was obtained through the indirect channels of the diaspora, creating a small window into Sudan for the international community.

Exposing the regime’s atrocities provided two-fold benefits, one for the international community and another for Sudanese nationals inside the country.

Considering the huge size (mainly before South Sudan gained its independence) of the country and the lack of communication, unless news was aired/broadcast back to them via satellite TVs and other international media outlets, most Sudanese would be unaware of the developments on the other side of their country. Nationals who had experienced torture and abuses at the hands of the regime would tell their stories once they left the country. This in turn is believed to have helped open the eyes of many to the crimes committed.

The Sudanese diaspora mainly in the West had been lobbying against Bashir’s

National Congress Party to the international community. This could occur either through demonstrations at the respective Sudanese embassies or at other activities organized by the previous regime. While dispelling the influence of the regime in its host countries, this pressure helped Sudanese opposition groups attract monetary contribution, providing

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support in terms of organizational skills, training, capacity building, and many other ways.

Social Crises as Precursors for Political Mobilization

Bashir’s regime did not leave many openings for non-state actors to organize inside Sudan. Repeated nationwide crises, however, finally forced the regime to loosen its grip. Those crises weakened the regime, allowing other organizations such as medical doctors and youth networks to chime in and take over.

In August 2013, Sudan was hit by the worst flood in 25 years, leaving about a half million Sudanese nationals in dire conditions (Tran, 2013). As former member of the association Mahjoub, and the current spokesperson Ameen recount, Sudan Change Now was among the most active grassroots organizations that promptly responded to help affected citizens. This response and the group’s remarkable groundwork established the organization’s name and reputation among the people. This track record helped the grassroots movement easily mobilize the demonstration in September 2013.

Sara Abdelgelil, the president of the Sudan Doctors Union in the U.K. and one of the spokespersons for the Sudan Professionals Association (SPA), writes, “Diseases outbreaks and social injustice within the Sudanese public health system has contributed to the December uprisings that removed Omar Al-Bashir from power on 11 April 2019”

(2019, p. 31). Abdelgelil explains that the various health epidemics and social campaigns that hit Sudan during Bashir’s times helped bring health professionals and activists together where they could coordinate outside the influence of the state. This helped the

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would-be revolution organizers link with community leaders and build bonds. As the government observed this strengthening organization, through its security, NISS, the regime began infiltrating, seeking to create divisions within the organizers. They also sent confusing signals to the people as a way of tarnishing the organizers’ efforts. As

Abdelgelil puts it, although the Sudanese people had been conditioned to not depend on the government, they easily recognized the government’s dismal failure during the crisis.

Abdelgelil (2019) discusses four crucial events between 2016 and 2018 that helped crystalize the call for regime change rather than possible reforms within the system. The Sudanese Doctors Union strike of 2016 under the slogan, “Our strike is for you,” was the first call. The health-care workers showed how the government had failed to provide basic health services and did nothing to address poor working conditions of the health-care workers. The strike was followed by the Cholera outbreak of 2017, which the

Sudanese government failed to deal with adequately. As a result, health-care professionals from inside the country and the diaspora worked with local NGOs, community leaders, and teachers to reach out to the most affected sectors and raise public awareness. The febrile illness outbreak of 2018 that hit East Sudan and the drowning of a group of schoolchildren in the Nile on their way to school were other social injustice campaigns that prompted professionals and activists to step in.

Sudanese security, NISS, had been notorious for infiltrating most decentralized initiatives. But the mechanisms changed with social media. As Abdelgelil (2019) elucidates, social media became the most reliable platform for communication and wider

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calls for participation. “WhatsApp and other social media platforms have proven to be a useful platform of linking youth groups, civil societies and professionals, and allowing these groups to activate when there are suspicions of any outbreak” (p.30). Social media was very instrumental in arranging workshops, launching urgent calls during crises such as blood donations, and coordinating campaigns. Abdelgelil concludes that it was the collective effects of those social campaigns that “have made the people understand that the unacceptable quality of health services will not improve unless the regime is replaced by a democratically elected civilian government” (p.30).

In the interview, Abdelgelil further elaborated on how such an established network was easily used during the December Revolution. As one of the spokespersons of the Sudanese Professional Association that spearheaded the revolution, she already knew about 60-70% of the professionals who were active and leading the uprising. As the epidemics helped them identify sympathizers of the regime, they were excluded from communication at an early stage. Responding to the epidemics also helped to identify who was better at what job, making it easier to cope and minimize frustrations (S.

Abdelgelil, personal communication, Jan. 24, 2020).

In an extremely tight situation, social media helped facilitate communication and build networks that later were reignited during the revolution. Social media performed double roles of communication and deliberation. The German-based scholar and blogger, el-Gizouli, argues that the social media platforms changed the communication structure and added an element of democracy. They bypassed the traditional power structure and

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allowed citizens to share their concerns easily without the feeling of being intimidated as in a physical space. As the blogger states, this was in addition to the confidence it granted the users who now didn’t have to worry about the security apparatus.

As el-Gizouli explains, although WhatsApp was very efficient and secure for communications, the role of other social media outlets such as Facebook was equally significant. Beside information exchange, he argues, Facebook allowed average people a space for satire. “People also discovered that they could satirize power, they could bring it down to where it really is – fake. They could do this anonymously and without being caught. And it transformed the way people dealt with power. It wasn't there anymore the military presence that you were scared of. It was the figures and the politicians and the names that you made fun off in the Facebook group and you satirized” (M. el-Gizouli, personal communication, Feb. 2, 2020).

Abdelgelil takes el-Gizouli’s element of adding democratic structure further. She states that for a few years prior to the December Revolution, many concerned Sudanese nationals inside the country and outside in the diaspora had been debating about the future of Sudan mainly on WhatsApp groups. Those deliberations led to a consensus that reform within the old system was not a viable option as many had been arguing for that.

Rather, complete replacement of the regime became the only option that the wide spectrum of Sudanese forces should work for (S. Abdelgelil, personal communication,

Jan. 24, 2020).

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The Revolution won’t be Televised, but Live-streamed and Live-tweeted

Over its 30-year old tenure, Bashir’s regime had crushed different attempts that tried to unseat him. The Sudanese’ very diverse ethnic composition and race, combined with the vast geographical disparities, helped the regime to quickly defeat opposition either through its militias or the notorious security apparatus, NISS.

While most of the autocrats of the Middle East and North Africa were ousted in the popular uprisings that started in 2011, Bashir quickly crushed the resistance at that time and survived. Opposition, however, never stopped. The December Revolution was kindled by seemingly a small incident and not from the most expected or feared opposition forces. When the state announced the removal of subsidies, the price of bread tripled overnight. High school students from a small town called Atbara, which had been one of the strongholds of Bashir, started demonstrating, a movement that quickly spread to other cities and towns. The Atbara incident was part and parcel of the growing resistance against the regime.

Unlike with other countries, news coverage of the growing protests proved to be difficult. Sudanese-American journalist Isma’il Kushkush (2019b) who had covered

Sudan as a freelance journalist for eight years mainly for The New York Times and CNN, identifies two fundamental challenges that made covering Sudan difficult. The first was

“government-imposed restrictions on press freedoms, and a preference for simplified narratives in many foreign media outlets” (para. 7). As the second challenge, Kushkush cited the traditional binary reporting on Sudan by the mainstream media. “Sudan stories

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were overwhelmingly reported through the rigid frameworks of ethnicity and religion,

African versus Arab, Muslim versus Christian. These often overlook the nuances of identity, the details of politics and economics, and ignore alternative Sudanese voices in the multicultural country” (para. 12). While some of the critical media outlets had their licenses revoked, regional correspondents who either were based in Cairo or Nairobi were repeatedly denied entry visas to Khartoum, Kushkush says.

For the above reasons, most of the substantial reporting on the December

Revolution came from citizen journalists. Photos and video clips captured through smartphones, which were amplified by the traditional media, became the signature of the uprising.

The day after the revolution began, Bashir’s government shut down access to social media networks. But it didn’t take long for activists to circumvent the ban through

VPN. As Al Jazeera’s “Listening Post” described this situation, in an environment of near total media blackout, WhatsApp and Twitter ended up playing key roles in the revolution. That’s why Bashir told his supporters in Kassala, “Changing governments and presidents cannot be done through WhatsApp or Facebook. It can only be done through election.” Bashir’s remarks were a sign of defeat for organizers on the ground. As one activist told The Listening Post in February 2019, “When a young person holds up his phone in Sudan street, he is posing the greatest threat to the regime, because he is documenting the crimes.” With over 9 million internet users at that time, with 90%

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having mobile phones, the momentum was much harder to suppress as the regime had done previously (Al Jazeera, 2019d).

Previous protests had been easily crushed by Bashir’s regime. The December uprising, however, evolved into one of the most sustained demands for the regime to step down. Part of the reason for this was how the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA) quickly turned the Atbara student protest into a nationwide demand for change. SPA was an umbrella group consisting of professional unions of teachers, engineers, doctors, journalists and others that came into existence in the aftermath of the repressed protest of

2013. Described by the ousted president Omar al-Bashir as a “ghost battalion,” SPA’s active members and organizers largely remained unknown to the public during the revolution. They used false identities to avoid infiltration and kept their plans secret until the last minute to avoid security infiltration (Majdoub, 2019).

Prior to the demonstration, SPA worked to encourage public discussions. In mid-

2018, the group published a study on living costs and the country’s wage (Alamin,

2019). The organization modeled itself after the October 1964 and April 1985 revolutions where the Sudanese masses successfully removed military rulers using peaceful protests.

Throughout the uprising, SPA had depended solely on social media to communicate with protesters and place their demands. This went back to the first

YouTube video post of Mohammed Naji al-Assam, a physician based in Khartoum. On

New Year’s Eve of 2018, al-Assam openly called for the downfall of the regime. A few

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days later he was taken to prison but remained the face of demands for change and one of the spokespersons of the SPA (Majdoub, 2019).

When the December uprising broke out, there was a built-in network of activists that successfully absorbed the wider demands. With members spread across continents and time-zones, SPA began depending on social media, mainly WhatsApp, to conduct meetings, organize, and communicate with protesters on the ground. Texas-based Husam

Osman Mahjoub served as spokesperson for the Sudanese Engineers Syndicate, one of the SPA organizations. Mahjoub explains that most groups were composed of 20-30 people across different time zones who would regularly update one another, communicate and strategize. SPA created a Facebook page and Twitter handle, both of which quickly drew a big following. Eventually these social media platforms evolved into the official outlets for communication, organizations and giving directions on what to do and what to avoid. When the SPA posted on its social media platforms, messages instantly spread through grassroots revolutionary committees, SMSs, phone calls and word of mouth

(H.O. Mahjoub, personal communication, Jan. 17, 2020).

Once the information blockage had been overcome, the info flowed non-stop.

Prominent Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih believes the regime had survived for 30- years by effectively blocking the flow of information. Once the people took the streets and realized they had nothing to fear from, a turning point had been reached. Albaih thinks social media played a huge role in neutralizing the control of information, “I think the change that happened was definitely the change in social media itself. The live

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function and Facebook, for example, had played a major role. It's not only something that you read about and you get fake pictures, but people can go live and report the revolution live from the ground. I think the difference is the advancement of technology, and the regime didn't figure out how to block it” (K. Albaih, personal communication, Jan. 15,

2019).

As the movement gained momentum, the speed of information exchange and live updates became overwhelming. The U.S.-based journalist Kushkush recounts one example that demonstrates the level of information flow. One Friday at a mosque, a

Sudanese activist spoke against the then Sudanese ambassador in Washington, D.C. The exchange was video-taped and instantly shared on WhatsApp groups. Kushkush lives in

Washington, D.C. area , but before hearing about the incident from fellow activists based in D.C, he received the video on the WhatsApp group, rather than from Sudan, just about an hour after the incident took place (I. Kushkush, personal communication, Oct. 16,

2019).

The undisrupted and unfiltered information exchanges were effectively utilized by

SPA. Kushkush says he doesn’t recall any organization or institution that had used

Twitter and Facebook as effectively as SPA. But it didn’t just employ the social media platforms for communication. Many people attentively followed them for their very poetic and sometimes sarcastic use of language.

Sara Abdelgelil, one of the spokespersons of SPA, explains the rigorous work her team put into each post. She remembers that the media group she was part of started in

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June 2018. As they anticipated complications and possible security infiltrations, they created a structure to avoid possible repercussions. The media branch created semi- independent groups. Although she acknowledges she doesn’t know many of them, she estimates there were about 15 groups just within the media section of SPA. Members of the groups were spread across different countries, including some in Sudan. After one news tip or announcement was debated and approved, different groups would be assigned to deal only with specific tasks: posters, translations, audio-visual, editing, posting and engaging in the conversation, etc. There were strict criteria on what to publish and what not to publish. For example, the media team had agreed not to publish images of children, harassment, bullying, discriminations, etc. The group was led by the Sudanese Journalists

Network. Using as an example the structure of the SPA leadership, the media team followed a horizontal style of building consensus. Three members at least must agree for anything to be posted. If some members expressed apprehension about any topic, the post would be suspended and reviewed until at least three members of the core group, called the “factory,” agree on it.

Abdelgelil admits that the work was very stressful as they were toiling around the clock, 24/7. Making the job extra daunting was the security precautions the members had to take. Abdelgelil describes the process to Kushkush (2019a): “Read and delete; use

VPN so they can’t track you,” As there has been a flood of information from protesters on the ground, the media group had to double down their efforts to verify, discuss a story’s possible implications and then post it. To reach the international community, as

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members who were based in Sudan couldn’t conduct interviews, the task was assigned to those in a safe place (S. Abdelgelil, personal communication, Jan. 24, 2020).

All Eyes on Sudan, all Roads to Khartoum

The uprising that started in December 2018 continued for about eight months with sustained civil disobedience until the demands were met. It was known mainly for its

“Occupy Wall Street”-type sit-in, a public protest in front of the army headquarters in

Khartoum.

According to Ameen, Sudan Change Now’s spokesperson, after December 2018 almost all Sudanese people took part in the revolution, either through direct participation, contributions and/or amplifying the resistance. Many ordinary men and women enrolled in the Resistance/Revolutionary Neighborhood Committees. The function of the resistance committee was to spread the news, give directions, and communicate the messages of the leaders of the resistance. This was done to circumvent the repeated internet disruptions, reach out to those who might be left out from social media, and provide practical help when needed (M. Ameen, personal communication, Jan. 13, 2020).

During the protests, most activists interviewed reveal they had been spending between 10-18 hours per day on work related to the revolution. The cartoonist Albaih says he has been active and had not slept for the last 10 years since the popular uprising in the MENA region. Albaih describes himself as a “virtual revolutionist,” as he used the internet space to communicate. As described by the Artists at Risk Connection, Albaih

“has gained global recognition for work that incisively depicts life in the Arab world and

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interrogates themes of social and political injustice… Albaih’s cartoons convey sharp and poignant criticisms of authoritarian and repressive regimes, while also expressing solidarity and hope for the future” (Canton, 2020, para. 1st).

During the popular uprising in the MENA region, Albaih’s cartoons would be stenciled on the walls of cities and the shirts of demonstrators. While he mainly focused on drawing in the previous uprisings, when it came to his home country of Sudan, he focused more on information. But he quickly captured the developments through his artwork and documented on his Facebook page with more than 86,000 followers and his

Twitter handle of more than 32,000 followers.

The second generation of Sudanese who worked in key posts in the West became the faces of the revolution to the outside world. U.K.’s Channel 4 News journalist Yousra el-Bagir, for example, was in Sudan when the protests started. Until she was instructed by the Sudanese security to leave the country, she documented and covered the atrocities committed by Bashir’s regime. After being expelled from Sudan, el-Bagir continued to update the developments on her social media and provided interviews to other media outlets in the English-speaking world (Channel 4 News, 2019).

Kushkush served as a point of contact between the inaccessible Sudan and the international community. He wrote around seven articles in leading outlets such as The

New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, and others, and gave interviews to BBC, NPR,

CNN, Al Jazeera, etc.

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I spent a lot of hours, especially during the first days I would be awake early

morning around 5:00 am of EST with the time difference in Sudan. Fridays were

always good days for protest as people go out for protest after prayers. So, I want

to stay awake and keep updated on what is happening there. I spent a lot of hours

and took me off from other activities because you can't help it. There were people

looking for updates and you must share. (I. Kushkush, personal communication,

Oct. 16, 2019).

The demonstrators risked everything to make sure their demands were met. The sacrifices made by the key contacts in the West were not easy either. As Kushkush wrote in May 2019 for The New Yorker, he served at the forefront despite his father’s condition:

On the evening of April 11, 2019, I set my alarm for 5 a.m. I was scheduled to do

a series of TV interviews the next morning, to discuss the fall of the Sudanese

dictator Omar al-Bashir. I had spent eight years reporting in Sudan as a freelance

journalist, mostly writing for the Times. At 3 a.m., my brother called and asked

me to meet him immediately. Our father, who had been hospitalized for four

months, had passed away. I cancelled all commitments. (2019c, para. 1st).

His father’s death did not stop Kushkush from providing updates either to the traditional media outlets or on social media. He recalls that he had been getting his updates via WhatsApp from journalists on the ground. Like others in the Sudanese diaspora who had been active during the revolution, the WhatsApp group was created before the start of the revolution. It was composed of more than 200 Sudanese journalists

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inside Sudan and the diaspora. As all the research participants stress, such a structure had been in place, and it was convenient to convert it later to this new, all-important cause.

The sit-in demonstration in Khartoum in front of army headquarters added to the momentum. The new communal life, open debates on the country’s future, poetry recitals, etc. were all live streamed via Facebook and other social media platforms by ordinary men and women.

Demonstrators showed determination that they wouldn’t budge until they saw changes. The army intervened and Bashir was pushed out of power on April 11, 2019.

Then Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Awad ibn Ouf, an ex-military intelligence chief, took over. His tenure lasted less than two days, and he was forced to resign. While celebrating

Bashir’s resignation, the sit-in protest continued with renewed energy. Until it lasted, it showed a new hope and solidarity. Magdi el-Gizouli captures the scene:

As an organizational form for protest the qiada sit-in was wildly successful,

probably far beyond the expectation of the parties involved. While it lasted, it was

a place where mostly young women and men could live out their claim to identity

as real citizens. Cash transactions were the exception in the qiada sit-in as the

protestors fashioned an economy of their own devised around the socialist instinct

of ‘from each according to her ability and to each according to her need’. Food,

medical care, public health services, security and transport were organized on a

voluntary basis and proved remarkably resilient. (2019, para. 4th)

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The sit-in demonstration can be linked to other similar civil disobedience such as

Occupy Wall Street. Communication scholar Eagan (2014) saw the return of the ancient

Greco-Roman tradition of parrhesia. Foucault (2001) in which the Cynics used their bodies and their vulnerability as another form of self-expression. As Happe (2015) characterized the militant lifestyle of the Occupy demonstrators who used their bodies as the highest form of resistance, similarly Sudanese protestors endured for months in front of the army headquarters.

While demonstrator in Khartoum showed their resilience by occupying the streets, the Sudanese diaspora was providing support. Honoring the sit-in demonstrators and having their revolution anthem performed was one among many shows of support.

Ayman Mao’s song “Dum” (“Blood”) provided the soundtrack for the uprising. Mao collaborated with other artists in the region to expose the despotic rulers of the MENA region during the 2010-2012 popular uprisings. After he left Sudan and settled in the U.S. in 2009, he composed songs against the ousted Ben Ali’s Tunisia, against Bashar al-

Assad of Syria and Omer al-Bashir of Sudan in 2013. Mao performed in protest rallies in various locations, including Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Dallas, and his song reverberated in both Sudan and the diaspora.

When Bashir fell, some ongoing negotiations took place between the military and the Force of Freedom and Change. Some Sudanese arranged for Mao to perform in the sit-in demonstration. As Kushkush (2019c) described: “When he arrived at the airport,

Mao, in disguise, immediately went to the site of the massive sit-in nearby. There, a stage

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was set up for him and others to perform in what was likely the largest concert in Sudan’s history. Despite technical problems, overcrowding, and at least 14 attendees passing out, the event was monumental” (para. 15th). The concert was illuminated by cell-phone lights. The artist later told The Spring magazine (2019) that he had been protected by two million people and felt safe.

Sudanese women, who had suffered doubly under the repressive government and institutionalized patriarchy, served at the forefront of the revolution. Starting with what later would become the iconic image of the Sudanese revolution, Alaa Salah singing on the roof of a car, women led the call for revolution. As the Sudanese journalist Zeinab

Mohammed Salih described, “Women make up 70% of marchers at some protests, observers say, defiant in the face of the repressive laws of the conservative Islamic state”

(2019, para. 4th).

Many Facebook groups of women turned into makeshift organizing and discussion platforms for the revolution. Among such Facebook groups was Minbar-Shat, an exclusive women’s chat group with more than 300,000 members at the time of the revolution. Initially created in 2015 to report on cheating husbands and talk in general about men and crushes, that focus seemed inappropriate after the second week of

January, as the creator of the group, U.S.-based Rania Omer, told ELLE. After one member shared a photo of the security officer in NISS who had harassed her, the women’s Facebook group began exposing and identifying the NISS agents who stood against their people. As some of the admins of the page were members of the resistance

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committees, identifying and publicly shaming members of the NISS officers became all the easier (Hagnah, 2019).

As Hagnah discussed in the same ELLE article, the influence of Minbart-Shat continued even after Bashir was ousted. For example, on Aug. 18, 2019, Sudan’s

Sovereign Council announced that it had nominated the revered pharmacist Nasri Morgos as its 11th member. Then a woman posted on the page alleging that Morgos had sexually harassed her, which was followed by revelations about similar experiences by other members. Within a day of the post, without an explanation, Morgos’ nomination was revoked. Two of the alleged victims met with Freedom for Change, illustrating the role of a Facebook post in holding public figures accountable.

Communication During the Internet Blackout and June Massacre

When Omar Hassan al-Bashir was removed from his post with the help of the military on April 11, the focus of the international media became whether he would be extradited to The Hague, as the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued an arrest warrant for him. Among the Sudanese protesters and opposition groups, removal of al-

Bashir from power was just one among multiple demands. Whether to extradite him seemed a tangential issue. In January 2019, the Forces of Freedom and Change, a coalition of civilian and opposition groups, which incorporated SPA among others, was established. As the Forces of Freedom and Change were demanding a civilian-led government, protesters continued their sit-in resistance.

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Negotiation was ongoing between the Transitional Military Council that took power after Bashir and the Forces of Freedom and Change. Wary of military rule, protesters gained more momentum and continued chanting, “It fell once, it can fall again!” strongly suggesting that the military generals should hand over power to a civilian government. The military commanders not only were undeterred by the call to relinquish power, but were emboldened by regional powers, mainly Saudi Arabia,

U.A.E., and Egypt. The military council’s second man and most powerful player was

General Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid

Support Force (RSF) who had sent soldiers with the Saudi-led coalition in the war in

Yemen. Having secured the most influential allies in the region, Hemedti brutally dispersed the sit-in protest (Abdelaziz, Georgy, and Dahan, 2019).

On June 3, 2019, in what later was commonly referred to as the June Massacre,

RSF soldiers stormed the sit-in protest. The attack took place during the 29th day of observing the holy month of Ramadan. Soldiers indiscriminately shot at protesters with live ammunition, killing more than 100. They threw the bodies of more than 40 protesters into the Nile river and injured more than 326 (Yuhas, 2019). Many women were sexually harassed and raped by members of the RSF forces. Until then, the revolution had been communicated to the outside world mainly through social media. Although previously the ban on social media sites had been easily circumvented through VPN and other mechanisms, the perpetrators realized that a complete internet cut was their only option.

They committed their atrocities during the blackout. Footage captured by mobile phones

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later showed how the soldiers targeted protestors. According to Bendimerad & Faisal:

“The shutdown has presented a significant challenge to the Sudanese diaspora, which has played a key role in spreading information from the protest movement internationally.

Those outside Sudan have been forced to rely on phone calls or word of mouth to receive information from the ground, without any visual footage, which they, in turn, had shared on social media” (2019, para. 10).

The Sudanese diaspora mounted significant pressure to end the blackout and communicate to the international community. When contacts on the ground reported the massacre, the U.K.-based SPA’s spokesperson Sara Abdelgelil began sharing with the international media and appeared in interviews to tell what was happening during the blackout in Khartoum.

Sudanese diaspora in different cities held protests in front of the Sudanese embassies, pressuring the Transitional Military Council to restore the internet and hold perpetrators of the June Massacre accountable. While communicating to the outside world about the developments inside Sudan during the blackout, SPA organized a nationwide protest. What later became known as the Million March, SPA announced the protest through their Twitter account, proclaiming, "Let's be loud on the streets again, and let's make the demonstrations on June 30th a prominent new page in the last chapter of the falling regime and its rigged council's drama.” June 30th was the day Bashir took power through a military coup in 1989. Hence the date symbolized the end of the regime

(Elmileik & Khalil, 2019).

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SPA announced the Million March while the internet was down. Therefore, the regular communication channels of social media were disrupted. As all the interviewees underline, neighborhood committees did the groundwork in coordination and spreading the information that had been communicated through SPA. Brochures had been handed out and dispersed through personal connection; murals and graffiti had been tagged on the walls encouraging people to come out and join the protest.

As Abdelgelil states, SPA had prepared for all of the scenarios. Before launching the call for the protest, it laid out different plans in consultation with IT experts. They predicted the scenario if the internet went down and the frequent WhatsApp message exchanges got disrupted. She reveals that they secured selected contacts with internet access in their office to relay the information to the neighborhood committees. Only mobile data, which most Sudanese people relied upon, had been cut during the blackout.

Telecom engineers utilized the maximum in sharing access, bridging the communication gap and connecting key organizers of the protest. Some reportedly smuggled international sim cards from Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Egypt, Kuwait, and other neighboring countries, and used international roaming data to get online and communicate with the outside.

SPA had chiefly depended on social media channels to communicate its messages. During the blackout and for those who do not have access to smartphones and mobile data, the gap was bridged through other means. Once the information blockage was countered, this created ground for other channels, among them Sudan Bukra TV. A former active member of Sudan Change Now and spokesperson for Sudanese Engineers

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Syndicate, Husam Osman Mahjoub was one of the founding executives of Sudan Bukra

TV. The station was established in early 2019 and began broadcasting through satellite in

March. Sudan Bukra was a publicly funded TV outlet that was founded with the goal of bridging the gap between social media and traditional media, thanks to the wide distribution of satellite dishes in Sudan households.

Considered by many as the voice of the revolution, Sudan Bukra mostly depended on citizen journalists from the ground. With a small budget that barely covered the satellite expenses, other core members of the team produced and edited contents from their homes. During the blackout and other occasions, Sudan Bukra would announce the official communication of the organizers of the protest. Hence the June internet blackout was challenged through neighborhoods’ committees, key contacts with uninterrupted internet connections, and Sudan Bukra TV (O. H. Mahjoub, personal communication, Jan.

17, 2020.)

#TasgutBas, #BlueForSudan, and other Social Media Campaigns

As Bendimerad & Faisal (2019) document, social media played a key role in the youth-led Sudanese revolution. It was the crucial tool to mobilize support, organize protests, and communicate to the outside world. As activists and leaders of the protest told Al Jazeera, on top of the organizing functions, social media platforms proved essential in documenting the brutalities of state security. In doing so, hashtags served as entry points for the wider international audience to follow and if possible join the resistance. The first major hashtag was #TasgutBas (“just fall”), a colloquial Sudanese

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Arabic phrase chanted by the mothers who were demanding that Bashir step down. The hashtags served as calls to reverse the lack of attention in the international community and amplify the sufferings of innocent citizens who were being indiscriminately harassed by state security.

Some hashtags such as #TesgutBas came organically from the protestors.

According to one of its spokespersons, SPA’s media team coined hashtags each week to highlight the week’s activities and set the agenda of discussion. Others were created to highlight the dire situations and call for wider attention.

#BlueForSudan was a major hashtag that drew the attention of world celebrities.

Many social media users turned their profile avatars blue and posted blue-themed symbols in memory of Mohammed Mattar. The 26-year old, who had been studying engineering at London Brunel International College, was killed when members of the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF) dispersed the sit-in-demonstration on June 3,

2019. RSF forces killed more than 100 civilians, harassed more protestors, and raped or sexually assaulted many women. Mattar reportedly was killed while shielding two women who were being harassed by RSF forces. When Mattar’s friend, blogger and social media influencer New York-based Shad Khadir asked her followers to turn their profile pictures blue, Mattar’s favorite color, the color eventually morphed into a symbol honoring the victims of injustice (Buchanunn, 2019; Oteino & Samanga, 2019).

Popular singers including Rihanna, Cardi B, Naomi, Nigerian singer Davido and the Kardashians, among others, highlighted the case; Haitian music star Wyclef Jean

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released a song “Nubian Queen” in support of the protests; U.S. Sen. and later presidential candidate Cory Booker expressed his support and condemned the attack. TV hosts including Trevor Noah, Hasan Minaj, and Dr. Phil covered the event on their shows, which drew large international audiences (500 Words Magazine, 2019;

Bendimerad & Faisal, 2019)

In addition to drawing international condemnation for the RSF forces, the

#BlueForSudan campaign played another role. SCN’s spokesperson Ameen explains, “In addition to raising awareness about the revolution, #BlueForSudan showed the indiscrimination of the brutalities. The martyr Mattar was a son of a rich and prominent family; that's why it was possible to reach so far inside and outside the country. This also gave to some extent the sense of equality; none survived the hostility and violence of the regime” (M. Ameen, personal communication, Jan. 13,

2020).

Other activists agreed about the utility of major hashtags, such as

#BlueForSudan, in generating support for the protests in Sudan. The Australia-based co-founder of Media for Justice in Sudan Sara Sinada says that by the time major international media started to cover the story, more than 100 people had been killed and about 800 citizens illegally detained. Only after the celebrities began highlighting the crackdown that it drew major international media coverage. Media for Justice in Sudan, a collective of Sudanese exiled youth who sought accountability about the June Massacre, similarly launched a hashtag,

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#KeepEyesOnSudan. Sinada explains that such persistent online and offline campaigns were intended to ensure that people never lose sight of the demands of the revolution (S. Sinada, personal communication, Jan. 25, 2020).

The June Massacre and how the Sudanese people reacted in unison against the brutality was a turning point, according to activists. A recurrent trend in the region had been how influential regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and U.A.E., with blessings from the West, maintained regional allies. All the interviewees mention that it couldn’t be pure coincidence that the massacre happened right after the chair of the Transitional Military Council, Gen. Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman

Burhan, returned from a trip to U.A.E. The recent relations between the Saudi-led coalition and Sudan goes to Yemeni war in March 2015. Shortly after the war broke out, Hemedti, the commander of RSF forces, sent about 7,000 mercenary militiamen to Yemen, generating a massive infusion of foreign currency for impoverished

Sudan. In exchange for his service, Hemedti was reportedly paid $350 million by

Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. (de Waal, 2019).

Sudanese activists had been wary of the unholy associations among the major powers in the region. When Hemedti’s RSF forces launched the attack in June, they quickly recognized its severity and hence were prepared to hold on. Husam and

Abdelgelil relate how the Egyptian revolution had been hijacked as Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. disapproved of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi from the Muslim

Brotherhood. Organizers saw that scenario in Sudan, too. In 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah

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el-Sisi massacred more than 200 peaceful protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa Square.

Sudanese protest organizers, who did not trust the military and radically avoided the fate of the so-called Arab Spring, stood their ground and quickly organized the

Million March to show their defiance. Husam believes that social media campaigns initiated by the Sudanese diaspora in the wake of the massacre such as

#BlueForSudan or #EyesOnSudan served as defining moments as they revealed the degree of resistance that was present. He thinks it showed the regime and its supporters that they could not remain unaccountable for their killings and tortures.

As the leading activists explain, the collective response, unwavering resistance and quick reaction to the brutality persuaded the regional powers to withdraw their support for military intervention in the peaceful demonstration. Recognizing the similarities, the activists worried that the same mechanism of military massacre that transpired in Cairo could happen in Sudan, and still the international community would react with indifference. That is why leaders of the revolution rebounded quickly after the June Massacre and organized a Million March.

After promising changes, activists continued to ensure that those who had lost their lives would receive due recognition. Mattar and others who had been killed during the protests turned into martyrs of the revolution. The transitional government honored him and others who died in the protests. A street was named after Mattar in Khartoum in December 2019. On Dec. 25, after he attended the event, Prime Minister Abdella Hamdok tweeted: “By renaming this street today we

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are immortalizing the memory of our martyr, Mohammed Mattar. We will be renaming streets, schools and hospitals after our martyrs to keep their memory alive among us, a constant reminder for us to guard this glorious revolution,” (Hamdok,

2019).

From the beginning of the revolution in December 2018, activists used different hashtags to draw attention to their cause and share its progress. Starting from the generic #SudanUprising, various hashtags such as #TasgutBas,

#IAmTheSudanRevolution, #BlueForSudan, and #KeepEyesOnSudan were used.

All those hashtags enabled the international community, the Sudanese diaspora and the media to closely follow the developments.

The Electronic Jihad in Casting Doubts and Spreading Misinformation

A revolution that primarily depended on social media for communication not surprisingly triggered a huge counterrevolution on social media by the state and its allies.

This section will explore how activists handled and debunked the huge flow of misinformation on social media.

Since the early 2000s in the then conflict zones of Darfur, the Blue Nile, and the

Nuba Mountains, Sudanese state security, NISS, had established an electronic combat unit. The electronic Jihad unit recruited students from the universities in Khartoum. Its main role became intercepting rebels’ phones and locating them for any potential attack.

The unit, which prided itself in hacking even WhatsApp chats, received help from China,

Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Russia. Among Western allies, NISS justified its actions as

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a means of stopping radicalized Sudanese from heading to Syria to join Islamic State fighters (Bodetti, 2017).

When the revolution broke in December 2018, Electronic Jihad began using its old tactics of sharing glowing news articles about the regime, spreading misinformation.

Some of the widely used techniques involved downplaying casualties from the attacks, fomenting feuds between different opposition groups, and spreading misleading information such as the date and place of upcoming demonstrations. Unlike the previous experience in which Electronic Jihad unit was notorious for infiltrating cells, this time around activists knew enough to take precautionary steps.

Activists cite two motives for the greater suppression of misinformation by the

Electronic Jihad unit. When the revolution was brewing, activists were able to identify who was who. In the many WhatsApp and other social media groups, activists had developed a quick response of either re-creating groups or sharing tips about people suspected of being government sympathizers. Commonly ridiculing Electronic Jidad as

“electronic chicken,” organizers were quick to debunk their information, casting doubt on their credibility.

While the Electronic Jihad thread has been somewhat defused according to the informants, external powers and influencers also posed a threat. As CNN reported, a

Russian company linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch tied to Putin’s administration, was involved in spreading misinformation through social media.

According to the report, Mr. Prigozhin was one of the 13 Russians who had been

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investigated and charged by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller for meddling in the

U.S. election of 2016. When the uprising in Sudan started, M-Invest, a company that claimed to work on "extraction of ores and sands of precious metals," launched a campaign to save Bashir. According to the leaked documents, through its Khartoum office, the company strategized to spread misinformation on social media, blame Israel for instigating the protests through the Darfur rebels, and even suggested public executions of looters to make an example (Lister, Shukla & Elbagir, 2019).

Some of the proposals suggested by the Russian advisers were implemented.

Darfurian university student activists appeared on state TV claiming they were recruited by Israeli intelligence to incite violence. As my interviewees assert, the public quickly dismissed the claims and protesters responded by chanting, “You arrogant racist, we are all Darfur!” As the protests grew stronger, the Russian company advised Bashir to disperse them with "minimal but acceptable loss of life." The developments reached out of his bounds and he was ousted (Lister, Shukla & Elbagir, 2019, para. 3rd; Kushkush,

2019a).

The Russian oligarch was unable to save Bashir, but regional allies, namely

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and U.A.E., pulled from a similar playbook when the Transitional

Military Council took over after Bashir. According to a New York Times investigation, an

Egyptian company, New Waves, run by a former military officer attempted to support the military council. In the wake of the June 3 Massacre, as Sudanese continued demanding accountability and justice for the victims, New Waves posted compliments for the

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military generals who commanded the massacre. According to the investigative report, the company was owned by Emirati and had been active on similar missions across the region, favoring authoritarian rulers in the region. With more than 360 compromised accounts and an outreach of more than 13.7 million Facebook users, the company portrayed the Sudanese military leaders, mainly Hemedti, as saviors. On Aug. 1, 2019, when Facebook shut down compromised accounts that were active in such deceitful scheme, The New Waves was exposed (Walsh & Rashwan, 2019).

In comparison to the financial investments put into trolls and electronic jihads, activists believe their effectiveness was very limited. But this does not mean everything went smoothly. Despite constant debunking of the fake information being shared and guiding the masses to credible outlets, activists acknowledge that the trolls were effective in casting doubts. The energy wasted discerning fake videos/tips/claims and the ensuring discussions was huge. This especially was the case for responsible groups such as SPA’s media team, as they had undertaken rigorous fact-checking before sharing anything to the public. They had to work twice as hard to counter the trolls.

The social media posts promoted by the regional powers such as U.A.E. and

Egypt reportedly praised the military generals. While some were intended to create doubts and hijack the conversation, activists believe that others were meant to test the general feelings of the populous. For example, activists recall social media posts praising

Maj. Gen. Salah “Gosh” Abdallah, the former NISS chief, as the most competent

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successor of Bashir after the latter was ousted from office. When activists mocked the posts, they didn’t last more than a day.

Demonstrators Insist: “It isn’t Arab Spring”

Mainstream media were quick to frame the Sudanese Revolution as an extension of the so-called Arab Spring. Activists and coordinators who were interviewed insisted that their revolution was different. The fact that both were youth-led revolutions facilitated through social media was the obvious parallel. The trajectory of the unsuccessful “Arab-Spring,” as in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, is what Sudanese activists sought to avoid. Drawing from the long history of Sudanese military dictatorships, organizers were careful not to trust the military. As subjects of this research reveal, that is why the sit-in protests continued undeterred when Bashir was removed from his post.

During his tenure, Bashir also had been scaring off his constituents with constant reminders of how the uprisings in the MENA region turned out. For example, during his sham presidential election of 2015, Bashir warned the Sudanese what might happen if they tried to challenge him. El-Gizouli (2015) recalls: “The president’s electoral message, spoken in readily accessible Sudanese colloquial Arabic, has been a consistent pledge of more of the same, but contrasted with the turmoil of the Arab region. ‘Do you want to be like Yemen?,’ president Bashir asked the crowds wherever he spoke, drawing a roaring

‘no’, in a cycle with Libya, Syria and Iraq as further examples of state involution” (para.

3rd).

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Abdelgelil believes that any democratic change in Africa, whether in Sudan or other countries, was seen as a threat to other dictators in the region. “They kept reminding us about the Arab Spring and threatening us that we will end like Syria, Libya,

Iraq and Yemen. But we kept reminding them of what happened in Tunisia, what happened in Rwanda, Ethiopia which are good examples in African.” She recalls one interview where she debated with the host not to be linked with Arab Spring. “I said what we want is an African Spring, not that Arab Spring. I think yes, it's a threat that's still there, and I don't think we're out of the woods in Sudan. I think we're still in the revolution. It has not been complete, and we have to continue to establish a true democratic state” (S. Abdelgelil, personal communication, Jan. 24, 2020).

Activists had long discussed possible scenarios that might lead to hijacking the revolution. Understanding the recurrent case in the region where the military would accomplish a quick takeover or a nation might fall into civil war, Sudanese activists seem to have prepared for that possible eventuality. Kushkush explains the lessons drawn from

Arab Spring:

Concerns about conflict breaking out in Sudan, in particular – a legitimate worry

given the country’s size, location, and abundance of rebel groups and militias –

have been dismissed by protest organizers there, who insist that they will not be

dragged into armed face-offs with the military, as in Syria. They have emphasized

the peaceful nature of the protests while simultaneously encouraging large

numbers to take to the streets to avoid the fate of protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa

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Square, where hundreds were killed by the Egyptian military in 2013. “Peaceful!

Peaceful!” has been one of the main chants during these latest Sudanese rallies.

(2019a, para 16th).

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

My findings show that the diaspora social media were instrumental in reviving the spirit of the youth to reclaim their space in their home countries. The three northeastern countries had been known for their repressive media, dearth of independent civil society, and lack of access to independent rights groups. Their political atmospheres had been cemented as traditional opposition were crushed by lethal forces. Youth-led, decentralized social media movements emerged as new challengers to repressive power and changed the landscape of the opposition for the better.

In the three countries discussed, social media played different roles in challenging the linear state narrative and re-invigorated the youth to be politically engaged. Using three theoretical frameworks, my findings reveal that in the three countries social media sites were instrumental in creating organic public spheres for deliberation, coordination, and strategizing. Risking imprisonment, exile, and death, the youth in these three Horn of

Africa countries spoke truth to power. Social media played a major role in facilitating frank talk as opposed to the persuasion or flattery that had been the characteristic feature of media outlets operating under the regimes.

In the case of Eritrea, as it was (and remains) nearly impossible to challenge the current regime from inside the country, any form of dissidence could only operate from outside. The slow internet penetration rate inside the country, coupled with the centralized (state-owned) internet service provider and telephone services left most

Eritreans living inside the country out of the conversation. The huge outflow of people

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from the country created momentum and permitted different opposition forces to operate from exile. As discussed in my findings, social media evolved as a collective hub and springboard for the Eritrean opposition forces. The major function of the social media had been in challenging the state narrative and overtaking the diaspora-scape. Since the war of Eritrean independence, the front that won the independence had heavily invested in the Eritrean diaspora community. As many were part of the mass movement and active supporters, after the country’s independence, the majority continued to support the state, and in practical terms become an extension of state policies. The ruling party leveraged the huge Eritrean diaspora for its approval and support of state policies. Many of them were coerced or co-opted to support the state’s policies out of ignorance or the absence of an exit strategy. Social media provided a major contribution in challenging and decentering the state narrative. Activists managed to exert pressure and shed light on the human rights abuses committed by the state.

Although the process has been slow, the diaspora activists have come a long way in reclaiming the space that had been exclusively dominated by the ruling party and its organs. Exiled activists successfully delegitimized the coercive and co-optic apparatuses of the state that maintained its hegemony. Although activists could not bring lasting political change to the country, they did challenge the state in different ways: their efforts mobilized the Eritrean diaspora to oppose the regime by way of motivating many to stop paying the diaspora tax; and denied the regime the platforms to conduct their yearly festivals, seminars and cultural shows in the diaspora. Prior to recent changes in the

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political landscape, these events were crucial for the Eritrean government to strengthen its base and solicit money.

The huge information gap and miscommunication between Eritreans residing inside the country and those in the diaspora was substantially bridged thanks to radios and satellite dishes that reach Eritrea. Low-budget, citizen journalism style TV stations closed the information gap between the diaspora and citizens inside the country.

Eritrean diaspora social media evolved as an organic public sphere. These independent public forums empowered many to challenge and decenter the official narratives that had been inculcated through rigorous state media. Overall, although the

Eritrean social media activists could not secure lasting change in many ways, they did succeed in cutting the tentacles on which the ruling party stood. Despite losing much of its previous support, the Eritrean regime was sustained by the volatile politics and regional struggle over influence in the Horn. Since 2015, the Eritrean port of Assab had been leased to U.A.E. as a military base for the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen war.

Having secured two of the most influential regional powers, Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. and by extension Egypt, the Eritrean ruling party was able to withstand the continued internal and external pressures.

The role of social media in bringing change to Ethiopia has been more pronounced. Many activists had been pushed out after repeated crackdowns, and they subsequently employed social media to fight back and reignite the once-silenced youth population of Africa’s second most populous country. Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, the

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EPRDF party, passed four major bills that curtailed free and unregulated information dissemination. These bills were added to the already beleaguered scene where political opposition groups had been forced to flee, remain silent, or worse, end up in jail. The imperceptive political atmosphere was penetrated and challenged thanks to the wide use of social media. The state security repeatedly attempted to curb the huge outflow of information through different means.

Although the EPRDF ruling coalition, led by the minority TPLF, has been facing growing challenges, it was mainly the Oromo and Amhara protests that brought the party to its knees. The lack of independent media and civil society groups to report on the ongoing protests was compensated for by social media, mainly Facebook. Social media arguably created a platform for the marginalized Oromo youth to narrate their stories.

The sustained Oromo protests that had been amplified by activists in the diaspora lent momentum to the struggle. Once the Oromo youth were emboldened and started to report live on the protests using social media, the state security was unable to deter and use their usual mechanism of suppressing dissent.

The sudden burst of social media-driven resistance brought fundamental change to Ethiopia’s resistance mode. The different ethnic-based opposition groups that had been operating from exile had failed to mobilize the youth. Youth activists, however, challenged the traditional power structure and quickly garnered wider support. Once the information monopoly had been punctured, the security apparatus lost control of the protests. The flood of information, which had been broadcast back and amplified by the

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diaspora activists, shook the status-quo. Rights groups and other backers, including former allies, were unable to disregard the events and stay silent when confronted with raw images of the brutalities committed by the state security. This pressured the country’s allies, such as the E.U. and U.S.A., to take a stand and condemn the government’s mishandling of the situation.

What makes the Sudanese case slightly different from Eritrea and Ethiopia is the fact that social media activists bypassed the state impositions. Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s leadership had taken precautions and quickly suppressed opposition before. Following the youth-driven popular uprising in the MENA region, al-Bashir’s security had vigilantly tracked and responded to any possible eruptions of opposition. Activists, who had their plans of challenging the regime repeatedly aborted, realized they had to change their mode of resistance.

While al-Bashir’s government has been waging multiple ethnic civil wars, social media helped people in the widely scattered Sudanese diaspora to discuss their own affairs outside the influence of the state. The growing human rights abuses and economic austerities were aggravated by repeated natural disasters. As the government failed to address the humanitarian crises, this opened windows for non-state actors, such as health professionals and youth networks to get involved. Their participation was encouraged with WhatsApp end to end encryption. This helped the diaspora and concerned nationals inside the country to discuss issues and strategize. Before it suddenly broke out in

December 2018, the revolution has been brewing for a long time. Over the years, many

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Sudanese activists and people in the diaspora had been involved in multiple social media groups, mostly on WhatsApp and Facebook. As the groups were composed of nationals inside the country and in the diaspora, this helped identify who was who. Activists argue that although revolution cannot be planned and scheduled, what finally triggered and culminated into collective nationwide resistance was the longstanding discussions and debates coming to a head.

The lack of access to independent media had previously helped Bashir’s regime to clamp down on any dissidence and easily get away with it. When the December

Revolution started, activists quickly intervened and shaped the discourse. The Sudanese

Professional Association, using the already in-built networks, extensively used social media to organize, strategize, plan, and execute demonstrations. During the long sit-in protest in front of the army headquarters before and after the ousting of Bashir, demonstrators employed social media to maintain momentum, communicate with the diaspora Sudanese, and exert pressure on the military rulers who were reluctant to hand over power to civilian rule.

After the fall of Bashir, when the military council was trying to suppress demonstrators and force the civilian opposition to accept their conditions, social media played a key role in exposing the military’s brutalities and maintaining the resistance’s momentum. It extended to and included international celebrities, which garnered wider attention and created solidarity. This sent a signal to the military rulers that the people were determined for change and weren’t going to look back. Unlike previous

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experiences, demonstrators were determined to achieve accountability and wouldn’t let the perpetrators of crime go unidentified and unpunished.

Amid growing resistance driven by the youth, as opposed to the traditional opposition along political party lines, the three governments in Eritrea, Ethiopia and

Sudan devised different mechanisms to squash their respective resistance. Each government took similar steps, primarily aiming to disrupt the opposition’s communication technology. The Eritrean regime made internet access extremely slow and highly controlled. Thus, the whole season of the MENA uprising, commonly known as Arab Spring, was never covered in the state media. As information continued to leak one way and another, mainly through social media, internet cafes, where the majority of

Eritreans used the slow web connections, started to request ID from users. This was intended to discourage users from freely accessing or communicating with the outside world. In Sudan, a similar thrust was done in two ways: 1) deliberate misinformation through the state security agency to disrupt the smooth flow of information and cast doubt; and 2) arming tech-savvy youth known as Electronic Jihad to hack communications and identify organizers. Those who were caught while participating in underground cells were beaten down, sexually harassed and/or expelled from their jobs.

While Eritrea and Sudan have mainly employed fear and repressing online dissent, Ethiopia, under the EPRDF party, tried to quell the growing social media driven resistance in two different ways. It first passed laws that severely curtailed disseminating online information and restricting access to international rights groups. Unable to stop the

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growing youth resistance and the continued outflow of information to the diaspora media, the ruling party then passed a state of emergency that punished all communication and posting via social media. Turning down phone signals and disabling mobile data, as happened in Sudan during the height of the uprising, was attempted in Ethiopia.

As the pressure increased and the state security of each country realized things were running out of control, they resorted to deploying lobbyists and hacking diaspora activists. Ethiopian cyber security explored ways of infiltrating devices of diaspora activists to identify and suppress their sources inside the country. The state hired a PR firm to lobby and influence stakeholders. Sudanese military rulers, both Bashir and the military council that took power after him, depended on foreign firms to sway public opinion and discredit activists.

The fact that Eritrean activists could only operate from the diaspora, whether tipped by the national security or do it out of self-initiative to prove their loyalty, the most common mechanism of silencing diaspora activists was through vicious trolling, threats (including of death), and physical attacks by regime supporters against independent researchers and activists who work in behalf of Eritrea.

In all cases, the respective regimes’ aggressive steps to discredit the growing dissent did not bear the desired result. Resistance reached a critical mass and the youth seem determined to demand changes in the face of extreme hostilities and lethal responses. This brings us to a bigger picture: the link between social media as a tool of communication and the actual people behind it – the movers and shakers of change.

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Social media and modern technology helped achieve horizontal communication and the overcoming of each state’s information restriction. However, much credit goes to youth who succeeded in challenging the states’ live ammunition without physical protection. Therefore, the role of the motivators should not be overlooked.

Both in Ethiopia and Sudan, the credit for change and mobilization has been attributed to key visible actors such as Jawar Mohammed in Ethiopia and the SPA in

Sudan. However, the activists and leaders did not solely depend on social media for mobilization and action. The nitty-gritty work of mobilization wasn't done by the diaspora Ethiopian activists such as Mohammed or SPA in Sudan, but the Oromo youth and resistance committees in Sudan whose roles have been underestimated. The role exiled activists in Ethiopia and SPA in Sudan played was crucial. They served as political vehicles at the upper level of politics. This was crucial at the level of negotiations and forging international alliances.

Difficulties Ahead

In each country the demand for long overdue change started organically. Exiled youth in collaboration with the youth living inside the country took different courses of resistance. While Eritrea remains under the PFDJ regime, Ethiopian and Sudanese activists succeeded in unseating the repressive regimes of ERPDF and Bashir’s National

Congress Party. Granted, the decentralized popular uprisings did face crucial challenges after the highly anticipated changes.

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Lofty expectations in both countries have not been met. Everyday life barely improved as both Ethiopia and Sudan inherited broken economies and a lack of employment to absorb the youth. Such wider disappointments were met with decentralized power and wider use of social media platforms. Influencers and opinion leaders who gained popularity during the revolutions were still armed with social media.

Many started to use their influence to stoke ethnic violence and spread hate speech, especially in Ethiopia. As they have equal influence with the state or might even have more influence than the state apparatus, as in the case of Jawar Mohammed, it became difficult to counter their influence. Many of the social media influencers and opinion leaders such as Mohammed and Eskinder Nega had many followers and more immediate effects than political parties. Following the well-hyped political reforms of 2018, Nega told Al Jazeera TV’s “Listening Post,” “If Abiy Ahmed does not deliver the promise of democracy, then we'll be back to social media" (Al Jazeera, 2018a, para 17th). That is exactly what has been happening after two years of failed promises. Two major influencers among the Oromos and the Amharas, Mohammed and Nega, joined political parties. Although it is beyond the scope of this dissertation, they were accused of inciting violence and were indicted in July 2020. OMN, which started to operate from Ethiopia, was raided and blocked.

In response to the growing social media driven influence and hate speech that fuel ethnic violence, Ethiopian parliament approved a “Hate Speech and Disinformation

Prevention and Suppression Proclamation.” Rights groups predict that this will have

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chilling effect on free speech as there is great possibility the state will use it to curb free expression (Taye, 2020).

Although not comparable to Ethiopia’s growing hate-speech via social media,

Sudan is facing a challenge in its post-Bashir era. A greater part of the mobilization during the uprising was conducted through neighborhood resistance committees. The committees grew out of the need for self-protection, but they maintained the momentum and continued after the change in power. They continue to play a very crucial political role because they incorporate the voices of average men and women.

Following the political changes, there is a situation of dual power in Khartoum between the government and these networks of activists who were engaged in the resistance committees. While they don't have a veto over the government, they do grasp the needs of the street. As shown during the long protests, they can translate popular sentiment immediately into action. As the research informants reveal, as the state lacks the capacity to mitigate the role of the influencers, some continue to use their positions to stoke popular sentiments.

In both countries, such decentering of power concentration can help keep the ruling powers in check. In fragile political situations and precarious economic conditions, it can equally be used to stoke violence. In both cases, freer expression did not translate into political change and economic improvements.

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Appendix

Interview guide Interviewee #------Interviewee nationality______Date------Interview protocol for: “Social media in exile: Disruptors and challengers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan”

1. Opening A. Establish rapport Thank you for agreeing to provide me an interview and share your insight on the subject. B. Purpose The purpose of this research is to find out how social media activists in the three mentioned countries of the Horn of Africa use social media platforms to exert pressure on their respective governments. It is mainly to study the experience of social media activists from their perspective. Your responses are confidential. However, as you have been vocal on the issue, if you prefer to be cited with your full name and identity that too is possible. So I would like to hear first if you want to be cited with your full name or you want response to be confidential? C. Consent information In order for me to be able to properly quote you and verify your accounts you shared with me at any moment during my writing, I would like your permission to record the interview. The interview would take between 30-60 minutes. At this point, please be reminded of the oral consent to this study. If at any point you wish to discontinue the interview or object to the recording, you are free to do so and please let me know. If you are stressed or feel your account would imperil any activists’ security, you are free to stop the interview. If you have any questions or need clarifications, I would like to hear from you? If so, then we are starting the interview and recording it.

(Although interview questions change depending on the role of the activist, here were some of the general questions asked for social media activists of each country)

General questions for Sudan activists

1. What do you think was the role of Sudanese diaspora in the recent Sudanese revolution? In what ways have they contributed to the positive changes?

2. What roles did social media play in the ongoing change? Which social media platforms were mainly functional and effective?

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3. In the absence of well-functioning media in the country, how were citizens, mainly demonstrators on the streets getting updates?

4. Tell me little how SPA was operating its media? Where were the people who mainly run the pages and continued posting? How were you able to coordinate? Personally, how many hours were you spending on social media on average per day?

5. How was the message of Sudanese Professional Association reaching the demonstrators? How were they communicating, such as the Million March of June 30th? (Keeping in mind there was internet blackout then).

6. When the government media hardly reports the reality on the ground and the state taking severe majors to disrupt free flow of information, how were you getting accurate/or closer to accurate information to share and publicize?

7. While many Sudanese were loudly voicing their stand for the military rule to end, there were other forces, as later reported by The New York Times from Egypt who were disseminating fake news and praising the military. According to NYT report, the source goes back to Saudi and UAE. How damaging were such counter-revolutionary social media posts? Do you think they have contributed something in creating mistrust or misinform? If so, how were their claims often debunked?

8. What role do you think the social media campaign “Blue for Sudan” “Eyes on Sudan” have played both in creating awareness to the international community or making accountable the perpetuators of the crime?

9. When most media outlets had their license revoked and expelled such as Al Jazeera Network, how do you think were they getting their updates about the ongoing revolution?

10. This could be personal observation, but once Al-Bashir was ousted from power, much of the focus of the international media was if he will be extradited to ICC, while most leading Sudanese didn’t care much about this issue. If you agree with my observation, what do you think was the main reason for this?

11. If possible, can you share with me some of the negative roles social media has played during the protracted Sudanese revolution?

General questions for Ethiopian activists

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1. Before the current change of administration, you have been very active on social media, Twitter. Why do you invest this much time on social media?

2. How do you assess the role of social media and the Ethiopian diaspora in general in pressuring the Ethiopian government before the recent change?

3. Before the recent opening up, I guess it was very difficult to access accurate information from inside Ethiopia. Without accurate/verified information to substantiate your argument, how were you able to challenge the state’s centralized information?

4. Do you think social media played a significant role in filling the huge information gap? If so, how?

5. The EPRDF wing was very aggressive in countering diaspora social media activists where senior government officials including Hailemariam Desalegn and Getachew Redda have been calling them “terrorists” or “separatists.” While we also came to know later it was taking aggressive steps through INSA and others to target social media activists. In such difficult conditions, how were you able to communicate with sources on the ground?

6. Knowing the very limited internet access inside Ethiopia and the continuous disruptions through the state of emergency decrees, do you think the messages many of the activists in the diaspora exchange and share reached citizens inside the country? If so how? How were you engaging local audience inside the country?

7. What role did social media play in creating content for traditional media during the ongoing demand for change?

8. How was the online and offline resistance, particularly the #OromoProtests coordinating and supporting each other?

9. What kind of resistance/opposition/discrediting did you (either personally or colleagues) receive from the EPRDF advocates? Did it go beyond trolling then?

10. Was EPRDF or TPLF using similar tactics to discredit or counter the pressure from activists? How effective or how invested were they in creating counter-narratives to

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balance the force of change? Were there some paid bloggers or social media activists who were working to discredit your efforts?

11. Last year on Al Jazeera, Eskender Nega said, “If Abiy failed to live-up to the expectations, we would return back to social media.” Do you think social media is playing some role in the current leadership in holding it accountable? If possible, I would love if you could also comment with the recent incident regarding Jawar as he created some unrest through social media post?

12. In case you have some anecdotes that you might want to share on the course of social media activism (could be positive or negative)?

General questions for Eritrean activists 1. You are very active on social media sites, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. Why do you invest this much time on social media?

2. How many hours per day (on average) do you think you devote to social media?

3. What do you think has been the role of social media so far in the Eritrean political- sphere? How do you assess its role?

4. What role do you think social media have played or continue to play in the Ethio- Eritrean current situation?

5. We all know that it is nearly impossible or very difficult to access accurate information from inside Eritrea. Without tangible/accurate/verified information to substantiate your argument, how do you challenge the state’s propaganda?

6. You have been coordinating active Twitter users and collaborating on different campaigns, why did you take such initiative? What are some of the results you observed?

7. You have been spearheading #EndHighSchoolInSawa, #Yiakl, among others. Can you tell me its impacts? What was its effect both inside or outside the country? If you could also tell me how the campaign started.

8. Knowing the very limited internet access inside Eritrea, do you think the messages many of the activists in the diaspora exchange and share reach citizens inside the

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country? If so how? Do you have personal experience where citizens living inside Eritrea have reached/contacted you (apart from family members)?

9. Over the course of your activism and your involvement on social media, have you noticed any shift of political stand (referring to the majority)? What could be the possible reasons for that? (If possible, I would appreciate if you could provide me with time frame of the shifts; eg. after the peace deal, after the releasing of report of COI, etc.).

10. What kind of resistance/opposition/discrediting do you receive from the Eritrean regime supporters? Does that only stop at the supporters or even goes to government officials?

11. Do you receive private threating messages apart from character assassination posts on the regime-friendly websites? If so how do you deal with such coordinate trolling?

12. In case you have some anecdotes that you might want to share on the course of social media activism (could be positive or negative)?

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