Social Media in Africa

Today, people seem blinded by their outsized enthusiasm for social media. According to them, a few clicks can change the whole world and accomplish wonders such as curing cancer. Good intentions become sufficient on their own, as if there were no need for medicine and scientific researches anymore. Well, this is pure nonsense. Facebook’s likes cannot save African children from starvation, the same way Twitter’s 140 characters will not put an end to acts of terrorism. This notion is not even remotely debatable. For instance, the project Kony2012 had a perfect starting point; inspiring video, moving story and most importantly worldwide spread. Unfortunately, the terrorist is still at liberty, and the lack of thorough investigations is to blame. Instead of focusing on the real problems of war and kidnapping of children, the so-called activist related to the obvious and spent all of his money and energy on his movie. Ultimately, due to the predominance of weak-ties, the project was not successful. More importantly, certain tools of social networks, especially “likes” and “retweets”, encourage people to feel good about themselves, when actually they should incite them to put their efforts and means in the cause they supposedly defend. As Gladwell wrote, “[current] activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that

Samantha Nutt, a medical doctor and co-founder of War Child, narrates her sixteen years of experience traveling in conflict zones struggling to help the most vulnerable targets, women and children. Her book “Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid” strings that bind Western nations to war torn countries and simultaneously critiques the serve of militarism and misguided aid efforts, which she believes to exacerbate their mission in bringing relief from poverty and conflict. The author analyzes from her multiple trips to war zone nations of Congo, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

The ease of availability of social media is key in allowing awareness to be brought to human rights issues. Most of the pressing humanitarian issues of our time take place far away from our home of the United States. Though in years past this distance prevented us from always being aware of the outside world, this is no longer the case. With the recent boom of social media in the past decade now anybody from anywhere, including these far away places, can interact and share information online: “The result was a breakthrough in education far beyond Duke, one whose purpose was

“Social media makes the community part of the actual crisis communication response. For example…Twitter was used to quickly share initial information and updates during the 2007 and 2008 California wildfires, 2008 Mumbai massacre, 2009 crash of US Airways Flight 1549, 2010 Haiti earthquake, and 2011 Tunisian uprising.” This information, again in Veil’s 2011 article, reinforces the idea of how social media communication is highly beneficial and furthers an individual’s ability to remain informed on current events.

Appropriate technology, such as social media, affecting communication during the crisis situation and how these technologies may be used to enhance communication

In the Central African Republic the majority Christian population is spreading extreme violence and evading the homes of thousands of Muslim minorities. This genocide is occurring right now, and is creating a humanitarian crisis and is on the genocide watch list. “The shortage of adequate food, water, and shelter has created a humanitarian crisis”(1). This is similar to the holocaust, because of the extreme food shortages and poor treatment to the victims. It is also alike to the holocaust, because of the religious identity of the victims. The only difference is the mass

The documentary #chicagoGirl shows the integral role the internet, particularly social networking sites, have played in mobilizing activists in the middle east. The film follows Alaa Basatneh and her role in coordinating protests and supporting the revolution from across the world via social media. Basatneh was born in Syria but her family moved to Chicago to escape the oppressive regime. She and her family got out far before many others could. She began living a normal teenage life; frequenting the mall, hanging out with friends, and casual social media usage. As news trickled out of Syria Basatneh new she needed to do something but felt too far away to make an impact. She soon realized her role in fighting the horrific conditions created in by President Assad was through social media.

Few places are more treacherous than the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Africa. For two decades, near-steady warfare has claimed millions of lives in the area.

The co-ordinated terrorist attacks induced fear in civilians within the zone of the attacks, many people were wounded and looking for shelter. However, through the use of the social networking website twitter, users began hash tagging ‘#PorteOuverte’ which translates to ‘door open’. Facebook also placed a ‘safety check’ on the website so that people who lived in france would be able to mark themselves as safe. Many users who used the hashtag #PorteOuverte were using the medium to speak out to people near the attacks and even posted their address in order for people to come for shelter. This shows that through social media, communication has increased and arguably improved social solidarity. However, this hashtag was also being used by people who were not living in Paris, offering their homes but by people who were touched by the kind acts shown among Parisians. This caused a difficulty as the hashtag began trending worldwide and would have caused more confusion, which illustrates that the modern medium of communication has faults which could have cost people their

In lieu of recent natural disasters like hurricanes Harvey, Jose, and Irma, people have been using social media as a way of a relief effort. Social media had been used as many things, but no one had really used it to provide relief efforts for natural disasters. This really started happening in 2017. People have started to use social media to help people that have been affected by the natural disaster. In today's society, social media and its effect on aiding people in natural disasters is overall a positive thing.

The C.A.R is undergoing a civil conflict since of 2012, thousands of people have been killed during the massacre. Battles between Christians and Muslims were common. Out of the population of 4.4 million at the time, 600,000 citizens were internally displaced and half a million fled for a chance of a better life. The scale and intensity of food security is unprecedented, an estimated number of 2.5 million are being affected by the crisis which is more than half the country’s population and double as many people since September 2014.

The Eastern Congo is considered a weak state because of the corruption, poverty and war. The Eastern Congo has a large amount of natural resources which should be an asset to the country, but war and rebel groups are feuding over these resources. The corruption and feud over these resources weakens that state. The Eastern Congo has a large amount of farmland that is not utilized and could be used to feed most of Africa, but conflict and control deter the people from utilizing the farmland[1]. The argument over these resources is ultimately affecting the civilians. Many of these disputes have existed for decades. I was astonished to hear that there have been 5.4 million deaths since 1994 in Eastern Congo, most of which are civilians and less

The influence of social media differs from country to country and the impacts, advantages and disadvantages changed in the course of time especially in foreign countries.

The 2011 uprising in Egypt was in many ways a traditional brick-and-mortar revolution, but with a cyber-twist to it: based on their statistical analysis of a large body of tweets related to the 2011 uprising in Egypt, Starbird and Palen (2012) observed that activists used Twitter as an important tool to share ideas and information with like-minded people, because Twitter allows a high number of activists interact using its retweet and other mechanisms. In this case, Twitter was used among participants and supporters of a traditional mass movement to bypass government controlled

In less than two decades, social media has revolutionized modern communication and information sharing. What began as a simple form of social networking has turned into innumerable platforms for people around the globe to share ideas, create and share businesses, promote brands, read news from various sources, as well as share and find vast amounts of information, among many other uses. Thus, with a few clicks of a button, people are now able to interact with someone on the other side of the world. The capabilities created through social media’s many uses have forever changed global politics, business, and interpersonal communication.