Tweeting democracy: An ethnographic content analysis of social media use in the differing politics of Senegal and Ethiopia’s newspapers

Abstract

Abstract This descriptive, empirical study gives context to how print journalists in two politically different African nations, Senegal and Ethiopia, use Twitter and Facebook to report the news and to what extent. We ask, ‘how is this new model of online reporting manifesting itself in Ethiopian and Senegalese newsrooms, given Senegal’s track record of democratic government and free press and Ethiopia’s infamously authoritarian control and censorship of the country’s journalists?’. The method is a content analysis of 60 days of posts on ten print newspapers’ Twitter and Facebook pages, to establish a comparative assessment of the two nations. Findings are also given context by comparing the print newspapers’ popularity on Twitter and Facebook against each nation’s top 20 most popular Twitter and Facebook pages. Results show Ethiopia to be markedly behind in Twitter posts, but the newspapers of each country show similar rates of posting to Facebook. Journalists in both nations are not livetweeting events, but instead are linking content on social media to the newspaper’s main home page.