Social media, political mobilisation, and democratic participation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Platform affordances, civic engagement, and disinformation dynamics in Nigeria, Senegal, and Zimbabwe

Background: Social media platforms have transformed the landscape of political communication, civic engagement, and democratic mobilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The rapid expansion of mobile internet access and smartphone adoption has made platforms including Twitter/X, Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok central infrastructure for political campaigns, citizen journalism, protest coordination, and electoral monitoring. Simultaneously, these platforms have become vectors for disinformation, hate speech, and coordinated manipulation that threaten democratic processes and public discourse quality.

Aim: This study examined how social media platform affordances shape political mobilisation and democratic participation in Nigeria, Senegal, and Zimbabwe, with particular attention to the dynamics of civic engagement, electoral discourse, and disinformation during recent election cycles.

Methodology: A mixed-methods research design combined digital trace data analysis of Twitter/X and Facebook content during the 2023 Nigerian presidential elections, the 2024 Senegalese presidential elections, and the 2023 Zimbabwean general elections, with qualitative interviews from 48 political communication practitioners, civil society activists, and journalists across the three countries. Content analysis examined 124,000 social media posts. Thematic analysis examined practitioner perspectives.

Findings: Social media platforms significantly enabled civic engagement and protest coordination in all three contexts, with WhatsApp emerging as the most consequential mobilisation infrastructure due to its end-to-end encryption and group broadcast capabilities. Disinformation flows were substantial during all three elections, with Nigerian and Zimbabwean electoral processes experiencing the most intensive coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Senegal's pre-election social media environment showed higher civic information sharing and lower disinformation prevalence relative to the other two cases.

Contributions: The study contributes to political communication, digital democracy, and media studies literature by providing comparative empirical evidence of social media's dual democratic roles — enabling mobilisation while enabling manipulation — across three distinct African electoral contexts.