Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Current Issue

The struggle for state regulation of the social media in Nigeria today finds expression in the desperate efforts by state actors to foster a negative relationship between the platforms and national security. The ban on Twitter in the country recently is a manifestation of the grand plan to regulate social media operation, which has been on-going since the inception of the current administration in 2015, with the narrative of national security prominently featured as a key justification. Using data derived from secondary sources, this study underscores the struggle for state regulation of the social media in Nigeria and the accompanying implications. Drawing insights from two recent case studies in the country – the 2020 #EndSARS protest and 2021 Twitter ban, the study argues that attempts at social media regulation hinged on national security are counterproductive and, if actualized, will close up available spaces that citizens have at their disposal to engage in critical discourse on pressing national security issues. The study contends that social media are key tools for robust discourse towards facilitating responsive governance in the twenty-first century as experience in Nigeria recently has shown. Against this backdrop, it argues that although Nigeria is confronted with a multiplicity of security challenges at the moment, attempts at hinging this rising tide of insecurity on the social media with the aim of regulating them amount to a misplaced priority and present the platforms as ill-fated scapegoats. Arguments in the study suggest that the basic motivations for social media regulation in Nigeria are repressive in nature and portend damaging implications to the process of good governance and democratic consolidation.

This article provides a contribution to knowledge on the growth of online news commenting in Nigeria. Specifically, it accounts for factors that influence the character of the often-fractious online discursive behaviour in evidence and what communication policy understandings might be developed from this. The article innovates by deploying a combined political economy–communication policy approach with two purposes in mind. First, drawing inspiration from the criticality of political economy, it shows how the ‘representational’ role of online news media sets the context for the nature of the discourse in evidence premised on the long-established assertion that media content is not value-free but shaped by ideological positions. Second, underpinned by a recently resurfaced argument espousing the value of a combined utilization of the critical and administrative approaches to communication research, the article puts forward a set of policy-related findings for media change in Nigerian polity often characterized by significant societal disquiet.

Two-way communication between the government and the public requires advanced information and communications technology (ICT). As a participatory platform, social media can facilitate public engagement and assist the authorities in introducing co-production of services with higher quality and at lower cost. This study examines the possibility, potential and challenges of digitizing the government and implementing two-way communication via social media in order to improve government information provision in an evolving digital ecosystem, using the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) as a case study. The study has adopted a survey method that gathered questionnaire responses from public servants working for the KRG, usually referred to as ‘employees’ in the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), carried out between February 2019 and June 2019 (n = 1215). The findings suggest that, at present, individual KRG employees use social media on their own initiative without following structured policies or coordinated plans involving the whole of government. As a result, this study recommends that the government develop structured criteria and a formal policy for using social media across all government institutions.

The revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) has brought about the long-awaited policy shift towards making the independence of regulatory bodies an explicit European legal requirement. At the same time, even on the points that it does regulate in detail, the AVMSD leaves many issues unresolved. Ultimately, it does not put the European Commission in a position either to verify whether national authorities are taking truly unbiased and impartial decisions or to enforce that they do.

This article assesses the viability of RTÉ, Ireland’s main public service media (PSM) organization, as an institution and media organization against the backdrop of the largest challenges affecting PSM today. It questions the extent (1) the presence of global platforms, (2) shifting media use and (3) (continued) government support have affected the programming, structure and legitimacy of the Irish public broadcaster. The analytical framework that serves as the basis for our analysis combines a media policy and political economy approach with cultural-sociological analysis. Using expert interviews and document analysis, we show that many of the challenges of RTÉ are generalizable in a European context and a wider international context. We argue that while the government may not be directly undermining RTÉ, its funding position may become so eroded that it would no longer be able to deliver what one of our interviewees describes as a ‘BBC-sized mission in a small jurisdiction’.

Review of: Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television, Eve NG (2023)

Rutgers University Press, 212 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-97883-133-9, p/bk, USD 32.95