Digital-era contentious politics : a mixed-methods analysis of Facebook as a space for resistance during Tanzania's 2025 electoral crisis

Abstract

This research aims at examining the role of Facebook in mediation of contentious politics in Tanzania during the 2025 electoral crisis. The research analyzes the platform's use as one of the infrastructures for opposition's mobilization in an electoral authoritarian regime. The research shows that Tanzanian youth maintained their protest coordination through a sophisticated, strategic use of Facebook features such as the optimization of News Feed, live video for witnessing, Messenger for coordination at an encrypted level and formation of a collective identity in Groups which worked alongside offline networks and diaspora relay systems. Using a critical realist epistemological framework, the study adopts a mixed methodologies approach which includes quantitative content analysis of more than 200 Facebook posts from five protest Pages, alongside a qualitative analysis of the protest through a set of 37 semi-structured interviews with protest participants, IT experts, and regulatory officials as well as a digital ethnographic study of closed protest Groups. Building upon dynamics of contention theory by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, this study offers an enhanced theory of contention by developing the Platformed Contention Framework which shows how the interactions between the state and the opposition in the digital-age setting are determined by factors such as platform design, user agency, and the presence of governance gaps. The study results indicate that with Facebook engagement-optimized algorithms, protest-related communication can be digitally supported as a kind of opportunity for state repression especially when users' algorithmic literacy is able to strategically re-purpose commercial features. The analysis of this study point out that governance gaps between TCRA and Facebook/Meta that were created by technical imbalance, jurisdictional limitation and corporate non-compliance hindered the repressive capacity of the state and allowed for a continuous transnational digital activism. This study contributes to the literature in digital authoritarianism studies by showing how digitally platformed contention works in severe repression, and contributes to international relations theories by looking at the politics of global digital-platform governance on state sovereignty and transnational activism. The research establishes two main policy areas which need to be addressed through civil society digital strategies and corporate platform accountability and regulatory frameworks in authoritarian regimes.