Democracy on social media

Temporalities of Cyber Communication in Mozambican Activism

Abstract

This article analyzes digital activism in Mozambique, with an emphasis on the Facebook platform, investigating how networked communicative practices reconfigure the temporalities of political action and citizenship in contexts of repression and surveillance. Based on a qualitative approach, the study examined public posts from Mozambican activist collectives throughout 2024, which made it possible to understand how social media functions as chronotopes of resistance and arenas of dispute. The research draws on the concepts of cyber temporality, digital performativity, and algorithmic surveillance to reflect on the ways in which civil society resignifies democracy within the accelerated flow of online interactions. The findings indicate that Facebook, while expanding the visibility of denunciations and fostering practices of political engagement, is simultaneously shaped by dynamics of censorship, erasure, and algorithmic manipulation that limit its emancipatory potential. It was identified that the platform is not merely a technical communication tool but a sociopolitical field where the boundaries between everyday life and politics, public and private, visible and invisible, are constantly in tension. The study concludes that, in Mozambique, Facebook operates as a paradoxical tool: simultaneously a device of resistance and a mechanism of control. Recognizing this ambivalence is essential to understanding the contemporary challenges of digital democracy in contexts marked by restrictions on freedom of expression and inequalities in access to information and communication technologies.