Social Media in Africa, Part 3: Democracy

Traditionally, the greatest power that governments have held over their people has been information. The promise that connectivity brings to Africa is that people are now using that abundance of information for oversight of government and more interaction with administrations. To say that the propagation of internet and mobile connectivity in Africa has been disruptive is an understatement. A number of web and mobile applications are undermining the efforts of dictators and totalitarian governments, allowing them to be more readily be held accountable for their actions. In this post we profile some of them. Sponsor Democratizing Information Through Technology When the Ethiopian government instituted an SMS filtering service to censor mobile communication, the developers behind Feedelix responded swiftly. They created their... [read full story]