From Amplification to Exposure: Platform Affordances, Visibility and Risk in Kenya’s 2024 #RejectFinanceBill Protests
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53819/81018102t70119Abstract
Research on Kenya’s 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests has established that social media enabled a decentralised, youth-led mobilisation. This article asks a different question: what happened to the participants who made that mobilisation visible. Drawing on an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design combining a structured content analysis of 300 high-engagement posts on X and TikTok (12 June to 1 July 2024; Cohen’s κ= 0.82), a survey of 107 digitally engaged Kenyans aged 18 to 35, and 12 semi-structured interviews, we argue that the platform affordances that facilitated the protests were also the affordances that increased participants’ traceability. Algorithmic amplification carried unknown creators to national audiences and into the attention of security agencies; persistence preserved evidence of state violence and individual participation alike; hashtag coordination that assembled crowds also aggregated them. We term this dynamic affordance inversion. The survey registers its consequences directly. Only 7% of respondents felt very safe expressing political views online while 53% felt unsafe, and respondents reported a structured repertoire of defensive practice: disabling location (38%), avoiding showing face or voice (38%), anonymous accounts (33%), encrypted applications (19%) and post deletion (13%). Interviews show these choices were not merely technical but ethical, weighing personal exposure against obligation to peers in a manner consistent with Obonyo’s (2024) account of self-reflective African communication ethics. The article contributes an affordance-theoretic account of how digital protest generates the conditions of its own suppression, and evidence that the costs fall on ordinary participants rather than on recognised activists alone.
Keywords: Platform affordances, digital repression, protest, self-censorship, Kenya
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