The Technology of Hope: Twitter and the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign by Chelsey Smith A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In Intercultural and International Communication Royal Roads University Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Supervisor: Dr. David Black August 29, 2015 • Chelsey Smith, 2015 Committee Approval The members of Chelsey Smith’s Thesis Committee certify that they have read the thesis titled The Technology of Hope: Twitter and the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Intercultural and International Communication: Dr. David Black, Associate Professor [signature on file] School of Communication & Culture Royal Roads University Dr. Chaseten Remillard, Professor [signature on file] School of Communication & Culture Royal Roads University Dr. Merlyna Lim, Assistant Professor [signature on file] School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University Final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon submission of the final copy of the thesis to Royal Roads University. The thesis supervisor confirms to have read this thesis and recommends that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements: Dr. David Black [signature on file] 2 Creative Commons Statement This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/. Some material in this work is not being made available under the terms of this license: • Third-Party material that is being used under fair dealing or with permission. • Any photographs where individuals are easily identifiable. 3 Abstract On April 14, 2014 Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group, abducted 274 girls from a secondary school in the Chibok region of northeastern Nigeria. The mass abduction of the Chibok girls shook Nigerians and spurred a social movement where citizens took to the streets of Abuja in protest and demanded the return of the girls. The movement quickly infiltrated online spaces, and splashed throughout social media where celebrities like First Lady Michelle Obama and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres held up signs with the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Using semantic network analysis in following the “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag after the one-year anniversary of the abduction, and in-depth interviews with activists and influencers in Nigeria and North America, this thesis explores how technology, expressly Twitter, can influence the progression of a new social movement like #BringBackOurGirls. It finds Twitter serves as a powerful public space for minorities and marginalized voices to circumvent traditional media; once there, these actors can express opinion and opposition in a succinct format, as well as unite and organize swiftly in their capacity as new social movements. The case study also reveals important intersections between technology, radical Islam, gender, the tension between the Global North and the Global South, and online versus offline activism. Keywords New social movements, transnational activism, Twitter, Boko Haram, gender 4 Acknowledgements I graciously acknowledge the expertise, supervision, and patience of my thesis advisor, Dr. David Black. I am also grateful for the exemplary assistance of Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Foundation, as his dedication to open data and open scholarship made my project possible. But, most importantly, I am thankful to the participants of this study: the dedicated activists and those advocating for social justice across the globe, both online and in “real life,” that make change possible. Thanks to my parents, Daryl and Jennifer Smith, for their support, sound guidance, and encouragement in all of my scholastic and humanitarian endeavors. 5 Table of Contents Background ................................................................................................................................................. 7 Literature Review....................................................................................................................................11 New Social Movements .................................................................................................................. 9 Political Communication & Civic Engagement 2.0............................................................10 Clicktivism and Digital Advocacy in the Global Village .................................................14 Twitter and Social Activism………………………………………………………………………….15 Methods .......................................................................................................................................................16 Presentation of Findings.......................................................................................................................19 Social Media as a Democratizing Force ................................................................................21 The Place of Emotion in #BringBackOurGirls……………………………………………… 21 The Players, Audience, and Opposing Ideas of Agency .................................................24 Rising Against Radical Islam.....................................................................................................30 New Social Movements and #BringBackOurGirls ...........................................................31 Semantic Network Analysis: Community Clusters...........................................................34 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................35 Appendix ....................................................................................................................................................37 References .................................................................................................................................................39 6 “Because people shouldn’t go to school and then not come home. That’s just not right.” – Biola Alabi, African media expert (personal communication, April 23, 2015). On April 14, 2014 Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group, abducted 274 girls from their dormitory at the Chibok Government Girls’ Secondary School, Borno State, in northeastern Nigeria (Peters, 2014). The mass abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls shook Nigerians and spurred a social movement where citizens took to the streets of Abuja in protest and demanded the return of the girls. According to TIME magazine, the news of the abduction broke two weeks later (Alter, 2014) and a social media campaign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls went viral thereafter. The #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign gained global attention from foreign governments and celebrities calling for action, and was managed by activists and influencers on the ground and online across Nigeria. The success of the Twitter campaign in raising awareness and coordinating activists in support of the Chibok girls, among other things, demonstrated the power and value of Twitter as a tool for new social movements. The digitization of media and rise of social networking have radically changed the way people interact and organize, and how events are communicated and reported. Social media, given their ease of use and instantaneous nature, have advanced the rate of formation and development of communication, new social 7 movements and civic engagement by acting as a public sphere (Castells, 2011; Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013, p. 291). Social media are open, online networks that act as searchable databases for information, and as popular platforms for expression. Among social media, Twitter is a digital platform that variably supports one-to-many and many-to-many communication. Twitter users can retweet tweets by other users, follow other users, and follow conversations they are interested in by searching hashtags, a tagging system to organize content. Like Facebook, Twitter users may upload photos, videos, links, and biographies, but each tweet is limited to 140 characters. Although privacy settings are available, the organization of the platform is more open than Facebook, allowing users to connect with social networks based on interests, not necessarily who they know. Twitter users with the largest following and clout are commonly referred to as “influencers,” and will be referenced as such throughout this paper. Twitter is evocative, in its nature and use, of elements of what digital media scholar Manuel Castells has famously called the “network society.” In his view, humans organize and communicate through networks and systems (Castells, 2013, p.6). In a network society power is multidimensional and decentralized, and actors create power and counter-power by holding and switching the power of the networks (Castells, 2013, p.7-9). While traditional social movements have formal leadership and organization and are spread through pamphlets and oral exchange, new social movements are less formal, less hierarchical, more interactive, and often highly digitalized (Castells, 2013, p. 15). 8 New social movement and social change theories will be used to aid in exploring Twitter’s conspicuous utility in the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, alongside in-depth, semi-structured interviews with social activists in Nigeria and North America; these theories will be used to illuminate the qualitative