Dan Banik and Jamie Hitchen discuss how WhatsApp impacts everyday life in West Africa.
The role of social media in spreading political misinformation has received considerable attention. But various forms of social media also facilitate and enable participatory democracy across boundaries. They help to hold leaders to account as well as provide channels for airing the needs and demands of marginalised communities and vulnerable groups. These demands can sometimes even be propelled to the centre of public debates. While there has been considerable focus on Twitter and Facebook, the private messaging application WhatsApp has emerged as a especially popular medium for inter-personal communication. But WhatsApp has not received the attention it deserves. What is so special about WhatsApp and how and why has it emerged as the main form of communication for a wide range of actors on the African continent?
Jamie Hitchen is an independent research analyst and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He has written extensively on social media in West Africa and recently co-edited a volume with Idayat Hassan entitled WhatsApp and Everyday Life in West Africa: Beyond Fake News.
Twitter: @jchitchen
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Host:
Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod
https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/
Dan Banik: Jamie, it's great to see you today. Welcome to the show.
Jamie Hitchen : Thank you very much Dan, for having me.
Dan Banik: Let's start by talking a bit about the media landscape on the African continent as you see it. In many ways Jamie, there's been a digital revolution and many of the continent’s inhabitants have now greater access to different types of information. If I can ask you to please reflect briefly on how you can characterize the reach and influence of mainstream traditional media like newspapers, magazines, television, radio in relation to what we are witnessing in the sphere of social media. What are the similarities and differences and to what extent you think social media has enabled citizens to leapfrog mainstream media?
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah, absolutely. I think mainstream media is still very important to a number of citizens across West Africa, where I've done quite a lot of work. Particularly radio, I think that continues to penetrate and be kind of an integral way in which people receive information, not least because it's often communicated to them in a language that they are familiar with. I think audio formats in general are something that seems to resonate with kind of the oral culture that exists in a lot of these contexts as well. Newspaper has always had quite a low circulation in terms of actual physical numbers in some of these countries and confined to urban areas. I think what we're seeing a lot now in in West Africa is this kind of overlap between mainstream media and social media, which I think is really interesting to explore in a bit more detail. You see newspaper channels, there are WhatsApp groups, for example, where newspaper headlines are put in, or newspaper front pages are circulated, giving them a much wider reach in audience than ever before. Similarly, you see these newspapers moving onto digital platforms and sharing stories that they would normally only have in their written form into a digital form. I think the mainstream media has also been adapting to this new kind of political new media landscape in which they're trying to operate. And that has some positive benefits, but also some potential negatives. I think one of the challenges we see in West Africa, for example, somewhere like Sierra Leone where a lot of the media has political ownership. Political bias that comes from that. That's a historic problem and something that arguably social media platforms have done a little bit to try and address and tackle in terms of providing a platform for ordinary people to speak out and share their opinions in a less controlled way. Obviously, there are controls in terms of the way social media limits people’s ability to speak, but I think that's something that we've really seen that's quite interesting.
Dan Banik: Let's take a country like Ghana. It apparently ranked in the top 20 worldwide for countries where citizens spend most of their time on social media. This was, I think, statistics from 2018. What I thought was particularly interesting is that in that overview, Ghana is actually ranked higher than the United States or the UK, Malaysia, Sweden, Australia. In many ways I think just Ghana’s ranking there means that very many African countries like Ghana, you have people spending a lot of time on social media and it has become a very important part of the public sphere. I think this aspect of the digital revolution that we began our conversation with is particularly interesting given that the African continent in many ways has bypassed the landlines. They didn't have to go through that same archaic technology. One of the things that comes out in your recent book is affordability, data packages don't cost so much, and that is why social media platforms are thriving. Given that people have access to affordable phones mobile phones, there's also the role of phone sharing, I'm told. While all of this digital access or revolution has been positive, some have also been arguing, Jamie, that it has accentuated the digital divide, that there are those who have access to social media, and some don't. What are your thoughts there?
Jamie Hitchen: I take the point and that there is still to an extent a digital divide across the continent. For example, women in rural areas are less likely to be online than men in urban areas. Younger people in general are more likely to be online. I do think the point you raised there about phone sharing is also worth considering. There's a good article that came out this year, I think in African Affairs, which Elena Gadjanova and others wrote about direct and indirect uses of social media. There are those that have the phones that have the access directly that are sharing information. Then there are also those that are indirect, those that can benefit from being close to friends and networks who have that information online and who bring it to them in different formats. That’s not quite the same as being a direct user and having access to your own platforms on social media. I think sometimes there is a tendency in articles to say that social media is important or unimportant depending on the number of direct users in the country. I think that's a slightly problematic conception of the way in which social media impacts in everyday life and then circulates and permeates in into more offline spaces. Thinking about just what we talked about, thinking about mainstream media is only being a kind of offline media platform. I think thinking about social media as a purely online phenomenon misses a large chunk of the way in which it feeds existing rumor networks or conversations that people are having. I think Stephen Ellis wrote in the 1980s about this idea of pavement radio. Actually, the ideas really translate to the way in which social media also kind of brings conversations into a wider space. So yes, there are challenges of access, costs are cheaper, but still can be expensive for a number of people to actually get online to get the phone to pay for the data. But there are also ways in which that digital divide is being a little bit transcended by just the way that information flows from online to offline and back again.
Dan Banik: I did a study many years ago, on the Indian media’s coverage of stories related to starvation deaths. This was in one particular area of India, in East India called Orissa. It turned out that, and this relates to an earlier point you made, that the mainstream media was mainly owned by politicians, there were politicians in power, or maybe they were in opposition, but they were political dynasties of families or financial backers. Sometimes it is very open and sometimes it was more subtle. They were behind the scenes owners. Obviously, that shaped a lot of the mainstream media coverage. And we return to how that is similar or different to, say, social media coverage. But this other point that you made I think is also important. In terms of this phone sharing aspect, it reminded me of how local or vernacular newspapers in India, this was maybe 20 years ago and I still think it may be true now, that if one person bought it, there would be at least 10 people who would read that pay. You could not just talk about circulation rates and thereby influence just based on the number of newspapers sold, but you would have to think about how many people in reality read that same newspaper. I want to get back to social media and the different platforms, Jamie and obviously you've been interested in WhatsApp. I have to say that in Norway, I don't know how it is in the UK or in Canada, in Norway, WhatsApp isn't the big app. We use Facebook Messenger or Twitter or Instagram. For me WhatsApp is something I use mainly in Asia and in Africa. I think it's also big in Latin America. My question to you is, how do you think WhatsApp differs from these other rivals that it has? What is it about WhatsApp that has made it so attractive and popular on the African continent?
Jamie Hitchen: That's a good question and I think I would largely agree with you that it is used differently in different contexts. If I describe to someone in Nigeria that the biggest WhatsApp group I have on my phone is 5 people, my immediate family members, they kind of laugh and be like, that's not a group, because people are in 20-30 groups of 50-60 up to 150 people. What we've done of this research, I think one of the things that comes out clearly is just the simplicity of the platform. It's very easy to use, you can just flick up and record audio, even someone that doesn't speak or write English is able to communicate with others. I've seen WhatsApp groups that are entirely audio which are very difficult to follow, but you know people are able to just communicate like that. They are very low data in terms of, we talked a bit about data becoming more affordable, but still a lot of people get by on packages which are 25 megabytes for a day or something, so that also matters. Increasingly it's provided a kind of platform that connects these existing social networks and structures in a digital place and that's something we talk a little bit about in the book, for older people, for women, for religious organizations and so forth. Just simplicity is really important and it's people that you have direct contact with. With Facebook, you may know them, Twitter has its benefits in different ways, but it's often people that perhaps you don't know personally.
Dan Banik: So greater intimacy.
Jamie Hitchen: Yes, I think that intimacy point, kind of just feels as though people are connected into these same networks that they already are like. It recreates that sense of family or community that they may have in different. There are examples of family groups where parents living in the diaspora are able to feel as though they're connected into the lives of their children living in Nigeria by using WhatsApp groups and networks.
Dan Banik: And there’s also this aspect of privacy as I understand it, that it is considered to be more difficult to infiltrate than many other social media platforms. Am I correct?
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah, obviously it has end-to-end encryption which reduces the risks of that information being spread more widely. I think that applies more when you're thinking about people using WhatsApp for political or social mobilization. I'm not sure that a family WhatsApp group is particularly, I mean maybe they are, but that it's not probably the foremost reason for using WhatsApp in terms of that. I think it's just the simplicity and obviously there were some efforts with Facebook to have these Facebook basics where Facebook was given free, and Facebook still is also very prominent and popular, but I think the way WhatsApp has been able to recreate those kind of structures in an online format is really important to think of.
Dan Banik: I'm glad you mentioned the oral aspect, and this is something that I experienced earlier this year in India where people would send me oral messages just, you know, an audio file. I wasn't used to this. It is very simple if you are on the move and you don't have time to type or you're just too lazy, it is just nice to record audio and have that sent. But it was a form of communication that I wasn't used to, but I think it holds a lot of promise. But we can't really talk about WhatsApp without talking about Facebook's involvement, as I understand it. WhatsApp was launched in 2009, but something happened in 2014 when Facebook took over WhatsApp. There was this phenomenal increase in users. As you were saying earlier, much of the appeal has to do with this direct, intimate form of communication. You know who you're talking to or writing to. My own personal experience, Jamie, is that it can be so frustrating because people add me to certain groups and I sometimes really don't know how to get rid of them without being very insulting. So, you get bombarded with all these messages that you really don't want to be a part. Of can you say a little bit about how you think Facebook's attempt at creating an Internet revolution, as you said, the Facebook Free Basics program, this World garden experience that was banned in some parts of the world, including in India, what was this goal of this Free Basics program and why Africa? And whether that you think has also led to some people saying this is the rich world, trying to gain control of the African market that there's a self-interest element, that is why data is cheap and that is why. Facebook is promoting WhatsApp. Is there any reason to be suspicious of this huge sort of rollout of WhatsApp on the African continent?
Jamie Hitchen: Well, yeah. I think we have to be suspicious of the motives of a company like, well, Meta now, that that has the brand of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram within it. Because ultimately the way Facebook makes money is predominantly through advertising and collecting data about its users on things like Facebook that then it can share with advertisers so those advertisers can target ads towards them. That's a huge revenue stream for Facebook. The motivation of you know things like Facebook basics and getting people to have profiles and to use the platform more is, you've got to consider that one of the key motivations for that is to get people on board. Don't want to think about too much, but there's a huge new market in Africa for a billion people. This week the UN said that the population of the world has now reached 8 billion. If we think about demographic changes, the huge percentage of the world's population is going to be in Africa in the next 50 years. Putting on my kind of private sector hat you think about that as a big growth area. Alongside the rhetoric of “we want to bring Internet to the world”, and “we have this different satellites and connection cables”, things like Google and Facebook are all involved with, I think it would be remiss to ignore the fact that one of the primary reasons for them doing that is because they potentially see a big market there in the future.
Dan Banik: This world experience was also such that it restricted freedom. You could only, if I remember correctly, access certain websites that were pre-approved, not anything that you wish to, right?
Jamie Hitchen: One of the big issues and challenges was that they control basically the number of sites that were available to people that had these three basics platforms, which I think were rolled out in about 30 African countries with different providers. But yes, they were looking to have these channels that basically limited where you could go and who you could talk to. If you're wanting to fact check things, that becomes perhaps an issue because you're kind of limited in where you're able to go to find the information about things that you might read on Facebook, for example. I think WhatsApp is slightly different because one of the challenges that Facebook has had is that you had billions of users, they've tried to think about how they can monetize the platform through advertisements but with the end-to-end encryption, which is one of the selling points of it, and the kind of privacy aspect. You have that challenge of how do you take what is essentially private information and data and use that in a way that advertisers can benefit from? I think they still haven't really solved; they haven't really tried to address that. There are now kind of WhatsApp for business channels and companies can send you updates and things like that, but you don't get a lot of advertisements in the same way that you see on other meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook for example. I think it's largely been able to kind of retain its space as more of that kind of intimate chat environment despite these other pressures.
Dan Banik: When I speak with my colleagues in Africa or even in India, and by the way, China, of course does not use it. China uses a different platform, WeChat. It's quite a challenge for me when I have to contact my partners, research partners and colleagues depending on which country you use different social media platforms. What I found particularly interesting when I speak to my African colleagues is that WhatsApp works on every phone. You don't need a fancy smartphone. It does not, as you mentioned, does not take too much data or processor power. It's pretty easy, and it turns out it's extremely useful for journalists, it's there's a whole bunch of users, right? So, it's journalists, you could be the army people, political parties and their leaders. Also governments are sometimes using WhatsApp for issuing press releases. What I think is extremely important to highlight, something that you and your co-authors do in the book, is that sometimes there's so much attention on the negative aspects of social media. We see this now with Elon Musk and Twitter, you know, what's going to happen and whether it's going to collapse and all the negative impacts on children. That is true, but it is also important at the same time, and I'm particularly interested in understanding the positive everyday uses of social media. I, for one love Twitter because Twitter for me is what gives me information about new articles, new research. I connect with people like you. What is the positive story you think WhatsApp is contributed to?
Jamie Hitchen: I think I think you make a really good point there. There was an article I was just reading the other day by Nanjala Nyabola, who’s written a lot about digital environment in East Africa, but also globally, and talking there about the way in which Twitter, for example, is this kind of space where you come to find new people and new voices and different perspectives on issues, notwithstanding some of the issues and challenges. I think that was part of the motivation for editing this edited collection of articles because as we've been discussing, WhatsApp and other social media platforms are an integral part of people's lives. Yet we often focus on fake news and threats to elections and other aspects. I think there are a number of ways in which we've seen some really positive impacts that it can have, and we have to obviously think that these positives also have negative sides. The ways in which it's enabling people to organize and mobilize for kind of protests and challenging government, particularly in environments where it may be more difficult to do so in a public setting or a public way. You have a much more confined space that hopefully has that encryption that can prevent things from happening. In one of the chapters in the book we talk about the way in which women in Kano, for example, are finding more of a space online to engage with politics in ways that they wouldn't be able to perhaps do because of prevailing gender norms and challenges. Even just the way it's connected up people, older people that perhaps would be a bit lonely and lost in the world through these groups and enabling them to… one of the examples that we give in the book is also about the way that WhatsApp can be this kind of learning platform and space for debate and discussion. In Cameroon, this kind of group of healthcare practitioners have created a WhatsApp group where they shared not just psychosocial support for one another, but actually support about learning, how can they deal with a particular issue. We see that in a lot of circles you mentioned before about the way in which groups are different in different parts of the world. I don't know if you ever go to a kind of conference or a meeting in Africa, you'll find that the WhatsApp group is created the next day where people are then able to sit and discuss. It can be frustrating, and you can think, oh, I don't need any more groups in my life. But at the same time, it provides another platform for furthering debate and discussion in some of these areas. I think that's a really important tool that is providing for people.
Dan Banik: Thanks to your book I was able to learn about many very innovative ways in which WhatsApp actually contributes to promoting that positive narrative. One of the things that I read about related to preserving oral history in Senegal through podcasts- I did not podcasts were somehow disseminated through WhatsApp. I have to try that out for this show. They were drama series in Zimbabwe. WhatsApp is used for banking in Kenya, I wasn't aware of that. I thought it was MPesa but I think there is some sort of integration with WhatsApp. There's info on traffic in certain West African countries that are provided through WhatsApp. In Sierra Leone, I read about digital town halls for revenue spending during the pandemic because people couldn't get together. And I will come back to this the use by political parties in countries like Nigeria, WhatsApp as a political tool for election campaigns. I want to just briefly mention Nanjala Nyabola, she's been on the show, and one of the things that I read also that Nanjala talks about in relation to this misinformation in relation to fake news, is that sometimes we have a tendency of just blaming social media for doing this. But I think Nanjala makes the point that digital misinformation is often amplified or amplifies what is happening in a society from beforehand, so it isn't as if it is social media per se, but social media as a voice that amplifies other existing voices.
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is the conduit in that regard. The speed at which information can flow on some of these networks and the distances it can travel in a very short period of time amplifies the risks of misinformation because this becomes within five or six or less, you know, an hour, to that information is spread very viral. I think there have been some examples in India for example, where there's been cases of people being targeted for killing, reprisal killings that have been organized or motivated through these kind of WhatsApp-rumors,. I very much agree with Nanjala that you can't disconnect what's happening from on social media from what's happening in the country or context where that information is taking place. Actually a lot of the mis- and disinformation that circulates and spreads in some of these countries works most effectively because it taps into these existing understandings and narratives and rumor that permeate through society. If we think about the example of Muhammadu Buhari, the outgoing President of Nigeria, being this clone Jibril from Sudan, I don't know if you've heard this one.
Dan Banik: No.
Jamie Hitchen: Ahead of the last election in 2019, because Buhari had spent a significant period of time receiving medical attention in the UK, when he returned there was this rumor that it wasn't actually Buhari who'd come back. A clone, a guy who was called Jubril from Sudan, which seems like a kind of wild and crazy rumor and a completely illogical one. But actually, not to say that obviously it's not, it wasn't true, but not to say that there isn't logic to it. Nigeria had a former president, President Yar'adua, who left office to get seek medical treatment abroad and didn't return. There's that. There's also a general narrative among Nigerians that if you see an older person going to receive healthcare at that age when they are quite sick, but they also often don't recover their personal, and Nigerians personal experience of that is that they will not get better, they will end up unfortunately dying. Those kind of things feed into this narrative. I would ask people, even after the election, I would say, oh you don't still believe this, do you? And they say, well you never know. This is Nigeria. I was like, well, they haven't cloned anything apart from a sheep yet, and they said, well, you know this is Nigeria, anything is possible. Understanding the context really matters for understanding the way in which mis- and disinformation spreads on all social media.
Dan Banik: This reminds me of what happened to the Malawian President, Peter Mutharika, few years ago when he attended the UN General Assembly in New York. Usually there's a lot of criticism from citizens that these delegations are bloated, they cost the taxpayer a lot of money because everybody wants every member of the delegation to get this huge per diem. Anyway, he apparently did not return after the concluding session of the General Assembly, and he was aware, nobody in the country knew what had happened to their president. There were several weeks, or maybe even months, I don't remember. There was this hashtag on social media, including WhatsApp: #BringBackMutharika or something like that. I think social media platforms like WhatsApp on an everyday basis, Jamie, function as an avenue for venting social frustration. Some of it is rumor and gossip, but sometimes, people are just hungry for more information. And because there's so little coming from official sources, often people don't want to talk about, and in this case, in Mutharika’s case, he had shoulder surgery. And in many other societies, people would just say yeah, you know, he went and had surgery. But often there's this feeling that if you say that our President is sick, that is admitting to weakness, so it's better not to say anything, but that creates this vacuum where people just don't get enough information. That's where social media platforms like WhatsApp thrive. But I want to get us to discussed, Jamie, the political use of WhatsApp. In the book, you have several case studies from Ghana, from Gambia, from Nigeria that you mentioned, and I know you’ve worked on the role of social media in the 2019 elections in Nigeria. I find it quite fascinating that WhatsApp is used particularly, say in Ghana, in certain far-flung areas to message people, there is that visible social media presence, and major political parties are using it. It could be in relation to these WhatsApp groups that you were talking about campaign content in these groups, door to door canvassing, speaking points for party communicator. But also trying to address fake news. So, as I understand it, WhatsApp can be used to create fake news, but also to fight back against others that have created fake news. I also find it quite interesting that, I saw some research in Brazil, that it is the video content, Jamie, that is crucial. It is not just a text, right? In Brazil, there was some recent research showing that it was links to YouTube videos that was popular. I think also in your work you find that there are these short clips on WhatsApp that are more important than the long write ups on Facebook. How would you characterize the use of WhatsApp in political campaigns? What is it that politicians and their assistants and political parties and organizations find useful, and what do you think they find to be challenging while using WhatsApp as a platform for political messaging?
Jamie Hitchen: Just to go back to the point we were just discussing, I think it really does also matter about the context and the strength of political parties in that context. In somewhere like Ghana, where you have two quite strong political parties with quite strong grassroot networks, the tool is much more kind of embedded within those existing networks and an additional way of spreading information. As you mentioned there, there are some kind of interesting findings around the way in which people almost internally control the potential spread of fake information or false information, because it can backfire against that their party if they're producing ethnic hatred. In somewhere like Nigeria, parties are essentially vehicles for winning power and it's a lot more personalized. You still see the use of these structures, but they're not so much institutionalized, more linked to individuals, and then a little bit more informal in the way that they link up to parties and that distance in some ways actually helps the political parties. They can allow these groups to kind of free rein to spread whatever they like. It's more about can we win or not. And I'm sure in other in other contexts we haven't looked at so much there's also some intricacies there to just understand. I think first and foremost, WhatsApp allows parties to reach a huge number of people in a very easy and quick way. The work that we did in Nigeria in 2019 mapped out that you had this Buhari media center, and the opposition also had a similar structure where you had a WhatsApp group for all 36 states plus the Federal Capital territory, and then Nigeria has 774 local government areas and you had a WhatsApp group for each of those. That kind of means that very quickly you can send out messages to each of those groups and that's potentially 250 people who are then encouraged to share their messages into a much wider network. It's kind of an information overload approach if you like. I think it's not always clear yet how much influence and impact this information has on changing people's minds about how they vote, or what they're going to do. I mean, I think that's a challenge generally for pollsters across the world. What is it, a decision that makes someone go OK, now I want to vote for this other person or, it can often be very, you know, small things and factors. When we did the research in 2019, there was still a recognition that you cannot just rely on WhatsApp for reaching out to people. You need to be engaging in kind of these grassroots campaigns to vote buying and things like that is very common still in Nigeria. You need to actually be physically on the ground and providing something for your voters as well as the information that you're sharing. But it's something I think it's interesting to think about. Swinging voters or voters that aren't necessarily loyal to one party or the other, and there's a lot of effort that goes into, as you say, providing information about how to vote in these groups, which I think is really tied to the idea that you need to boost your own voter turn-out. That can be a key way to do so. There's a lot of information goes like, how to register first and foremost, then after registration process like how to vote for your party, like what the party symbol is, where you go, simple things like you put your thumb here and you vote for this party. There's kind of whole gamut of ways. I think one of the interesting things as well is, you mentioned this narrative of fact checking that emerges among political parties. I did find it very amusing in 2019 to hear both parties in Nigeria talking about fact checking each other. Using this language, particularly, which is just basically, can we push our PR or propaganda against theirs? There's not any factual basis. Ours is the fact and theirs is not the fact, but again, that's another way in which these kinds of groups and tools are utilized by political parties to… yeah, I think it's just another tool that they're trying to use to engage with prospective voters.
Dan Banik: But in addition to just generating political awareness, my understanding from having read your book, but also many related articles is that the power and influence of WhatsApp lies mainly in the ability of parties or leaders to mobilize voters. There may be people who will vote for you, but they may be lazy to get out, as you said. You want them in the election booths actually voting. It could work for ruling parties, but particularly for opposition parties, as was the case, I think in 2016 in the Gambia, when you got rid of Mr. Jammeh. I read in the book that WhatsApp was actually able to mobilize the opposition, create an online space for dialogue and consensus, which I think is often very difficult when opposition groups are trying to create a coalition. If you do have a platform that leads to that kind of consensus being generated, that is great. And then most importantly, I think Gambia also is a particularly interesting case. WhatsApp was able to mobilize the diaspora abroad. Again, these people living abroad are extremely important for campaign finance, saying they send a lot of money back. Again, social media has an enormous reach in that in that sense. But going back to Nigeria, Jamie, and maybe Ghana, I also find it fascinating how WhatsApp is used to endorse. If I'm standing for election and you as a very important or influential person endorsed me, then I can also use WhatsApp to showcase the fact that a celebrity has endorsed me, and that gets me some positive clicks. It could also be to signal that I am a religious person, or the church is backing me. But in terms of fake news, what I find fascinating is also what you write in the book that that I as a politician, or my party, may wish to indulge in discrediting my opponents. But my interest in doing so may be dependent on how active a social media, or the strength of my rival’s social media army. So, if my rival is very adept as a very good media team, that would deter me from making false accusations. There's almost like an inbuilt mechanism that prevents me from disseminating fake news if I know that I can also be subject to other people's fake news.
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah, well, that's a really interesting way of looking at it actually, and I think that's probably more true in somewhere like Ghana than it is in Nigeria. I think if we think about the current presidential race in Nigeria. There is just a constant battle, as you say, describing it in these terms of army and battle going on between social media. Armies for the different political candidates for the Presidency, for example. And in that case, it's kind of so embedded that you just constantly back and forth challenging the other candidate with whatever you have and trying to discredit them. I think that is a good point that discrediting political opponents is one way in which we do see one of the ways in which you can use WhatsApp. Particularly in in somewhere like Nigeria. Going back to the point you made about the importance of videos and pictures and these audios for example, and also the authority of the voice. That also is something that we also cannot overlook. As you mentioned, the endorsement of a religious leader or, we have these people who even create fake audios of a former Election Commissioner saying that one of the candidates is corrupt, or one of the candidates engaged in malpractice last time, it just never came out in the wash, if you like. I think this the point we've kind of touched on a few times, but there is this tension, and this is where we tried to highlight some of the more positive aspects in the book. For every kind of negative aspect, there's a positive, so WhatsApp audios are great in providing information. As an Election Commissioner, for example, WhatsApp can provide you a way of reaching out to voters and explaining to them how they may want to vote and. But then if you become a presence on this platform, people can then also use that to create fake information, either fake press releases or fake audios claiming to be, the Election Commission speaking to voters. I think one of the challenges around fake news that for me still remains unaddressed even with fact checking is that you have this falsehood that can spread very quickly, so within five hours it's everywhere and everyone's heard about it. The Fact Check struggles to catch up with that because it doesn't have the same networks. It's not being shared by, it's not coming from an individual that's trusted so much. It's coming from an independent outlet. And then also, there's the question, even if it does reach these people, do people actually change their minds? I think that's something that still is not always clear to me. You're presented with a “fact”, I'm using quote marks here, but then is that the fact that you believe, or do you still believe the other piece of false information that that you believe is a fact? So, I think that's something that is a is a real challenge in this kind of mis- and disinformation debate.
Dan Banik: I was going to ask you about the challenge of actually researching the impact of social. Media that itself is a wonderful field to explore. There is this fear I see in some parts of Africa. A few months ago, I think earlier this year in Malawi, the head of the Anti-Corruption Bureau was cited in one of these WhatsApp groups, a private message or a conversation in a closed group was suddenly made public. That led to huge problems for this lady because she may have aired her personal views and then this was used against her. I think there's this concern, Jamie, that WhatsApp isn't as private, so you don't really always know in these large groups who can rat you out.
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah. That's something that is kind of acknowledged in these groups. In the setup that we looked at in Nigeria where you have these structures of groups across states and local governments, the way in which you join those groups, it's a link that is posted and anyone can join. There's not really much vetting that goes on. There is an acceptance in it and work they've done. There are kind of spies within groups where there can be people that are not necessarily loyal to your party. What we've generally found is that political parties often have much smaller coordination groups of maybe 20 or 30, like a WhatsApp executive, where those things are discussed on a strategy level, and then the information is disseminated out into these groups. But you're right, it is possible to screenshot a WhatsApp conversation and then send that around, so you take away that privacy aspect just because of who is being given the information. There are obviously limitations on the privacy. There's obviously been some cases of hacking of phones through this kind of Israeli spyware software through NSO, which is also another aspect. Particularly in in repressive regimes, that they may look utilize when you go put to your point you're raising about how in the Gambia, something like WhatsApp was able to bring together groups that maybe wouldn't have been able to mobilize in person in a digital platform to kind of strategically plan ahead of a process in which they were able to remove the current or the former head of state.
Dan Banik: I was thinking also about something else, Jamie, how WhatsApp and this new form of social media sphere that we have is different from the old traditional media. This reminded me of the so-called high noon effect. High noon as this popular Western movie where the most important thing in these Western films is to be able to draw the gun quickly. We use the high noon effect to describe allegations of corruption that politicians used to level against each other and continue to do so in the traditional media and in the old days before social media. As soon as you drew that gun, and if you and I were rivals and I said Jamie Hitchen is corrupt, and I would use then my own media, my own newspapers with photographs of you looking really corrupt and dodgy and promote myself as being honest, irrespective Jamie, of the fact that you were corrupt or not, I would have created the impression. I have drawn the first salvo. I then gain a lot of traction. Then of course later you can use your own media to say, oh, what Dan was saying was wrong, but the damage is already done. Now, that was traditional media, I think in WhatsApp you have perhaps leveled the playing field a bit more, wouldn't you say? That you could react to these allegations more quickly and draw the gun also very quickly without lasting damage, because you could accuse each other of corruption and provide proof, right? Do you see that to be maybe an advantage of WhatsApp vis-à-vis the the traditional media?
Jamie Hitchen: I'm not sure if it's about the speed. I kind of like this idea of the high noon kind of drawing of the guns first. I do think, yeah, it does matter. If the narrative is set in a certain way, then it be can be quite hard to shake off. I can think of an example from the 2019 election where there was these made-up quotes going around that the presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, was being endorsed by an LGBTQI group in Nigeria, which was done to detriment of his campaign because those rights in northern Nigeria, where he has a strong base, are not supporting at all. I remember talking to some of the team that were working on his campaign and saying that even during the voting process itself, they were still hearing people saying, well, I'm not voting for Atiku because he's in favor of gay rights. I think it's an important point. If you set that narrative, it can be difficult to shake it off for people. What they hear first often sticks. It could be quite difficult to push back against it, especially if it feeds into some sort of narratives that they're familiar with. I'm not sure it's the speed that WhatsApp offers necessarily, although perhaps it does, but I think it's also that, you talked about, if you were going to accuse me of being corrupt, you would have to use your kind of media arsenal that you have at your disposal, which requires you to be of a certain status and have a certain degree of connections.
Dan Banik: That's a good point. It has in many ways democratized the space. You don't need to be a media owner to retaliate.
Jamie Hitchen: Yeah, exactly. Which has its pros and cons, but I think it gives you as an individual more of an opportunity and more of a space to push your own narrative. If you really controlled a lot of the media space, particularly in a country where you have little space for criticism of the state you may find it very difficult to get your narrative, my counter narrative may struggle to permeate anywhere because you control the narrative in a in a way. I think WhatsApp has hit that we've seen with citizen journalism and just more generally in terms of challenging the narratives of politicians. WhatsApp can really help with that. Just being able to give ordinary people more of a voice. I can think of examples where campaigning for elections, people, candidates have taken pictures to say, I completed this road, for example. There's one, I think it was in north in Canada, I can't remember actually the contest. Now, they said I completed this road, you should vote for me again and they took a picture of it and sent it round. It was circulating widely. But then a couple of people who lived in the community came across this information. They actually took a wider lens picture through, which was just a kind of 100-meter stretch of a 2 kilometer road which was built and the rest of it was still completely, you know. It allows that challenge to happen. I think that's a really great aspect of social media or generally in platforms like WhatsApp. If someone says rumors about this is happening in this area you have much more of a network now to be able to go like oh is this really happening? We can ask some people in that Community, they can send us pictures, they can send us audios, they can send us videos. As we've talked about, and this is the kind of the Yang and Yang of WhatsApp is that there's, there's all these the same things that are really positive for accountability, transparency, when it comes to governance, for example, are the same tools that can be used to you to make mis- and disinformation circulate and penetrate more widely. I think it’s finding that balance, which is proving quite difficult. And it's not just, to go back Nanjala’s point, but it's not just the platform that does that, it's the way that users do it, but also the kind of governance of the platforms as well.
Dan Banik: We've now talked about the political uses of WhatsApp. We've talked briefly about how women and other groups can use WhatsApp that could lead to more democratic participation. The platform can be used to access more information, participate more actively in social and political and religious life. But there are also other aspects where WhatsApp has been making a difference in everyday life, and one has to do with how businesses are using WhatsApp to advertise, market and sell their goods. And I read about these fascinating stories of the fashion industry in Nigeria. I'm sure they also involved the Nollywood, the video business, the film industry. But anyway, tailors and the fashion industry. How they use the status function to advertise goods to existing clients, but also how businesses not necessarily just businesses but also you could have some form of informal union activity. You can create an association, a network. That's one set of issues, and then you can also use it for knowledge creation for education purposes perhaps, or to impart information of health related information. I think WHO created a WhatsApp group during the pandemic. But also I think in Cameroon there's been a WhatsApp group, some sort of resource for health professionals dealing with conflict, mental health trauma, informed care. It seems to me that in addition to information about politics, everyday life, in addition to campaigning for elections, there's also this business aspect and also this knowledge aspect that I find fascinating as one of the more positive contributions of WhatsApp in Africa.
Jamie Hitchen: And I and I think that's part of this idea of the title, of what's happened in everyday life. There are so many aspects of life in which WhatsApp is kind of permeated becomes useful and used by people. You've given the examples you know about traffic, for example, or buying your goods or learning new skills and information. There's a chapter in the book about the way in which kind of these alumni networks can be really strong ways in which people are able to then access both opportunities, but also information that can help them with financial management or whatever it is that they're particularly interested in. They use the knowledge of group members to circulate that more widely. I'm going to Nigeria next week and I think last week I sent my the guy I use to make me caftans, I said I'm coming next week, can you send me some designs of cloth? I get like 50 different designs, and then I pick from them, and all that kind of shopping is done online if you like. There's been lots of talk about, and there are now even some trials in some countries where WhatsApp is integrating a payments platform. We talked a little bit about WeChat before. I think WhatsApp in a way is that kind of mega platform just it's not in a very formalized way. You will see people, academic groups sharing reports and information and commenting on them in that kind of format. It's not very functional to do that. But it can serve that purpose. I think we're going to see probably in a not-too-distant future, the way of actually a payment system where you can actually, I mean they are trialing already, where you can pay for goods directly on WhatsApp without having to… A lot of the time now if you're using it for an economic purpose, you often end up having the conversation about what you want and the price. And then you actually go to another platform to pay for it, whether it be in MPesa or whatever mobile money platform is working. I think the ways in which WhatsApp is really embedded in everyday interactions and people’s lives was one of the ways from doing the research on the politics. It just becomes clear that there are so many different types of groups and different types of ways people are using the platform. We wanted to kind of highlight those in a bit more detail to say, well yes, there are a lot of problems with false information, but we shouldn't always focus on those negatives. We're not trying to do some PR for WhatsApp and say this is all great but recognizing that there are a multitude of different ways. With COVID, for example, a lot of schools were closed globally and there was a lot of pivoting to using online platforms. In a number of cases people were turning to things, like teachers were creating WhatsApp groups to share information with their students in ways that were beneficial. There are still questions about, we talked about the digital divide at the start. There are still access questions. If you're, you know, too focused on these kinds of platforms, you still can risk missing people out when it comes to things like education. They certainly offer another avenue for people to learn from and something that we haven't touched on too much, but it's also about cross country learning and cross-country engagement I think is another really important aspect. I was struck when you mentioned about the case in Malawi about back bringing back our President. That obviously I'm guessing comes from the #BringBackOurGirls narrative in Nigeria. There is that cross pollination of information and ideas I think in places like Twitter but also in they can translate into platforms like WhatsApp. You're seeing networks being built, not just within countries which we focus on, namely in the book, but also kind of pan-African or pan-regional networks of people that that are either learning together or that are building socio-political cultural movements together, which I think is really potentially quite exiting.
Dan Banik: I really enjoyed reading the book. Congratulations and thank you so much for coming on my show today.
Jamie Hitchen: Thanks very much, Dan. It was really enjoyable to speak with you and to have your thoughts on what I've been spending many hours doing and the last few years. Thank you so much.