Social Media in Africa, Part 3: Democracy - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views
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Traditionally, the greatest power that governments have held over their people has been information. The promise that connectivity brings to Africa is that people are now using that abundance of information for oversight of government and more interaction with administrations. To say that the propagation of internet and mobile connectivity in Africa has been disruptive is an understatement.
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When the Ethiopian government instituted an SMS filtering service to censor mobile communication, the developers behind Feedelix responded swiftly. They created their product Feedlix, a java-based client that supports Amharic, Chinese and Hindi characters. The application then uses GPRS, through internet protocols, to mimic SMS and bypass the censoring filter put in place by the government.
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Sokwanele is a civic action support group campaigning for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe. Their website includes an 'election violence map' that provides detailed information related to localized occurrences of violence related to the election. During the most recent crisis in Zimbabwe, Sokwanele was used to get information out of the country when the government began restricting communication.
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