ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Facebook as a battleground for hegemony by the state, the media, and ordinary people on Facebook followers. It springs from the government's ban of popular political radio talk shows, commonly known as ebimeeza, which compelled Ugandans to turn to Facebook as an alternative public sphere to discuss the country's politics, particularly at the height of the 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections. I have characterized the migration of ebimeeza deliberative practices to Facebook as FaceBimeeza and argue that it has emerged as the new public sphere, similar to the public sphere Jurgen Habermas historicized. Using a combination of discourse and thematic analysis, the study analyses the posts on the Facebook page of a Ugandan television station known as the Nation Television and the reactions these posts generated among followers of the page to make the case that Facebook represents the reincarnation of ebimeeza and the new public sphere in Uganda.
