A media scholar, Mphathisi Ndlovu, says social media platforms will likely become a battleground ahead of the 2023 harmonised elections as political parties engage in a propaganda war.
Ndlovu said there is a high possibility that there will be a surge in online propaganda, hate speech, flaming, and cyberbullying as the country heads toward next year’s elections, writes Senzeni Ncube for CITE.
He said platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and News websites will be widely used by political parties and activists to disseminate their views.
Ndlovu made the remarks during a Zimbabwe Democracy Institute (ZDI) think tank meeting on key electoral reform challenges, gaps, demands and strategies held in Bulawayo on Thursday. He said:
My argument is that as we move towards 2023, there is a possibility that there is going to be what some of our researchers call social media dissidents, where they argue that social media will become a space where people will be contesting, will become space where ordinary people, activists, will be using social media to challenge to those who are in power.
Twitter will become a prominent space, there is a possibility that Twitter will turn into a battleground for political and ideological struggles because these digital spaces constitute a site of struggle for regimes of truth.
In 2020, ZANU PF’s Munyaradzi Machacha said the ruling party will create provincial social media teams to articulate and defend its policies and government programmes. He was quoted as saying:
We, therefore, should come up with provincial social media teams to articulate the party and Government policies.
While some people would be going to the farms while others work in industries, we should also have a cyber unit which will be involved in defending the party’s programmes on social media platforms.
Social media has become the new battlefield for control, but the opposition is using it to portray the country in bad light which is not the situation on the ground.
Definitely this has to be because ZanuPF has already quadrupled its propaganda machinery through zbctv and all its established proxies plus the Zimpapers stable..