ABSTRACT
Social media affordances have changed power relations between political elites and ordinary citizenry. This has been more pronounced in countries that have been led by tyrannical leaders as these new affordances have allowed citizens to speak back to power with limited consequences, especially if they can mask their identities. As a response to cyber resistance movements, several authoritarian regimes have enacted pieces of legislation to combat online mobilisation and censor citizens from speaking back to power. Some governments have even invested in counter cyber narratives as a way of containing and taming oppositional voices. In this study, the researcher investigates the phenomenon of social media dissidence in Zimbabwe from 2013 to 2016: How digital natives deployed social media for counter-hegemonic purposes. The period under study is important as it marked a variety of social media driven forms of resistance against Mugabe's and Zanu PF rule. Using qualitative data drawn from Facebook and Twitter and deploying a reconfigured theorising of the public sphere and of subalternity, the chapter examines the nature of digital-native dissidence movement that calls itself #Tajamuka. Methodologically, the study employs virtual ethnography and purposive sampling. The study concludes that in the absence of offline democratic space in Zimbabwe, citizens have had to resort to the online sphere for dissident practices against the ruling party and the government. Through social media, these cyber dissidents have managed to force power to account, limit extreme use of force and humiliate politicians who for long operated with impunity.
