ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, ‘(De)constructing the movement: The social media ecology of #FeesMustFall’, explores the role of social media in the nationwide student protests against increased university fees in 2015–2017. The chapter provides a context to #FeesMustFall (#FMF) by describing the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) protests and the role of social media in those events. It argues that both RMF and FMF should be seen in the context of rising social inequality and protest cultures in South Africa. Twitter and Facebook created a space for the youth to become politically active and were used by activists to organise offline protest activities. These flat, leaderless movements highlighted the power of social media enable the youth to develop a new biography of citizenship, focused on personalised forms of activism. The hashtagged activism of FMF represented a networked student movement that occupied online and offline spaces simultaneously, with Twitter used to raise awareness, promote alternative protest narratives and live-tweet events as protesters became citizen journalists. Twitter was used to organise and promote events and to spread alternative protest narratives, while Facebook played a role in more engaged deliberation and debate and WhatsApp was used mostly for internal communication among activists.
