Five activists, four African countries, eight languages, five weeksPosted
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TEDGlobal Internet Room. A Creative Commons image by Flickr user, Erik (HASH) Hersman, June 3, 2007. (CC BY 2.0)
Global Voices sub-Saharan Africa in conjunction with Rising Voices will host a Twitter campaign as part of the project, “The identity matrix: Platform regulation of online threats to expression in Africa,” from April 20 to May 22, 2020.
Read more: ‘The Identity Matrix’: A new project for African digital spaces
Building on “Writing Toward Freedom: Politics and digital rights in Africa,” this five-week social media outreach initiative will involve a curated dialogue on @GVSSAfrica featuring five African language activists who will focus on the intersection of language and digital rights.
Identity Matrix is funded by the Africa Digital Rights Fund of The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA). Global Voices is part of the grantees for the African Digital Rights Fund.
The activists will tweet in African languages like Bambara, Igbo, Khoekhoe, N|uu, Swahili, Yorùbá, in addition to French and English.
They will also share their personal experiences and insights using a language lens on challenges and threats to digital rights.
The conversations will interrogate how threats to net neutrality marginalize digital content in African languages; the expansion of mis- and disinformation in African languages on various digital platforms and what companies or civil society are doing about it; the effects of a lack of affordable internet connectivity in places where there are large communities of speakers of an African language; the importance of and challenges for the right to access information in digital spaces in African languages. They will also look at corporate policies, as well as ongoing challenges that may affect how citizens can freely express themselves in their language.
Meet the #IdentityMatrix Twitter Hosts
The Twitter conversations will be anchored by Denver Toroxa Breda (Khoekhoe/N|uu/English) from South Africa, Adéṣínà Ghani Ayẹni (Yorùbá/English) from Nigeria, Kpénahi Traoré (Bambara/French) from Burkina Faso, Roseblossom Ozurumba (Igbo/English) from Nigeria and Bonface Witaba (Swahili/English) from Kenya.
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