Internet Shutdowns in Africa| Dissent Does Not Die in Darkness: Network Shutdowns and Collective Action in African Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the role of communication technology in repression and collective action focuses largely on social movements in the West or the Arab Spring. Much less work has analyzed how “networked protest” responds to government efforts to stifle the information flow and the factors underlying these responses, particularly in African states. We explore these dynamics by examining the interactions between deliberate network shutdowns and protest mobilization. We draw on examples from countries in Africa that have executed shutdowns between 2017 and mid-2019. Although the impact of such disruptions on collective action fluctuates across the continent, they are often followed by escalations in the momentum of preexisting protest or a continuation of previous dynamics, and citizens use a variety of strategies to continue mobilizing. We also highlight the importance of varying levels of connectivity, social media penetration, and strong structures of organization and coordination in networked movements’ responses to repressive strategies deployed to quell them. The article outlines a picture of activism and repressive practices in the digital age, highlighting the backfire effects of information vacuums.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".