Increasingly more African countries are instituting laws, procedures, and policies, seeking to regulate the media ecosystem. Governments typically justify such approaches to regulation as a way to combat the negative consequences of online media usage, such as hate speech and mis/disinformation. This trend generally reflects the historical application of censorship laws that have targeted the critical press and journalistic autonomy (Obijiofor et al., 2016). The implications of this are considerable. What we are witnessing is the integration of two regulatory paradigms – for the traditional and digital media – into one, with the potential for state authorities to expand blanket censorship from media to citizen expression in ways that mirror the politics of regulation. A central issue at play here is the struggle over the appropriation and exercise of power over collective voices, with consequences for democracy, plurality, independence, dissent, and freedom.
No doubt, media and digital regulation have intensified in recent years across the globe in what has been described as the “regulatory turn” (Flew et al., 2021, p. 208). The aim, it seems, is to manage the disruptive effects of the usage of media technologies. What has been largely overlooked, however, is an overarching investigation of this trend in Africa. This is in spite of the reality that state interventions such as social media bans, which are becoming common on the continent, are disruptive in themselves. Meanwhile, the few scholarly collections which have examined separate angles of the subject have done so predominantly from the traditional media lens only (Chan-Meetoo, 2013; Sampaio-Dias et al., 2019). For instance, Chan-Meetoo’s (2013) edited collection considers how African journalists negotiate regulatory and ethical requirements demanded of them. Other works have looked at regional or linguistic peculiarities in traditional media regulation on the continent (de la Brosse and Frére, 2012; Limpitlaw, 2021). What has also been neglected is the fact that new media platforms are mainly domiciled in the West, bearing implications for digital sovereignty in Africa.
Furthermore, research centred on Africa has barely considered emergent regulatory practices that cover the traditional media, online harms, social media, blockchain technologies, privacy concerns, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the wider internet of things. This conference thus creates a space for researchers to build on previous scholarly work and to share, discuss and debate contemporary regulatory interventions in media technologies across Africa in attempts to regulate disruption, and their impact on societies. Topics that we consider in this conference include:
- Press and broadcasting regulation
- Social media regulation and online harms
- Online broadcasting regulation
- The politics of regulation
- Internet and social media bans
- Regulation as disruption
- Regulating/regulated disruption
- Platform governance and self-regulation in Africa
- Regulatory frameworks, methods, and methodologies
- Online privacy and data concerns
- Regulation, the balance of power, and digital sovereignty
- Punitive media registration
- African Union, multi-stakeholderism, and media regulation
- Regulating artificial intelligence and other new media technologies in Africa
The Regulating African Media conference will take place on 3 & 4 May 2022. Please visit the homepage to see the conference schedule.