Critical Analysis of Social Media Discourse in a Socio-Politically Fragile Context: The Case of Facebook in Ethiopia

From November 2020 to November 2022, Ethiopia was in a devastating (civil) war. During the war, platforms such as Twitter played significant roles in spreading propaganda and shaping narratives. The warring sides–the central government of Ethiopia and Tigray regional forces–have been accused of using social media (SM) platforms to control the narratives about the battles. In the process, they often made misleading and false claims about the war. It thus led to the weaponization and manipulation of SM platforms such as Twitter by military, academic and political elites and other SM actors. This study will, thus, primarily trace the contents produced by prominent SM actors to investigate the influences of the offline political discourse. It aims to understand the interactivity between online and offline political spheres and discourse in a capricious social milieu (such as Ethiopia).

Kibrom Berhane Gessesse, an Ethiopian academician, has three different master’s degrees: Journalism and Communication from Addis Ababa University; Global Journalism from NLA University College (Norway); and Research and Innovation in Higher Education (Erasmus Mundus program), Tampere University, Finland. Kibrom also has two BA degrees in Sociology, and Journalism and Communication. He has served Mekelle University (in Ethiopia) as a senior lecturer of Journalism and Communication for more than a decade. He is now a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC.