04 Donald Mavhudzi, Tajamuka Activism Online The last speaker to give his lightning talk under this session was Donald Mavhudzi from the online social movement #Tajamuka. Donald spoke in place of Promise Mkhwananzi who could not make it to this year’s IGC. Donald started by giving a summary of Tajamuka’s activities which include advocating for better socioeconomic conditions in Zimbabwe. He then explained how Tajamuka harnessed social media as a tool to get the Tajamuka message across to various parts of the country which the organisation would otherwise not have been able to reach had it relied solely on offline methods. Hillary Clinton in a speech she gave when she was still Secretary of State, rightly described the Internet as the “new town square.” That is, the Internet has given people an opportunity to assemble together in virtual spaces for the purpose of sharing similar political, religious, and other views 19 Misa Zimbabwe Second Internet Governance Multi Stakeholder Conference 21 September 2017 which cannot be safely shared in offline spaces. Tajamuka is testament to this fact, this is seen by the large following the social movement enjoys online. However, Donald lamented the fact that the Facebook likes and Twitter Retweets, Tajamuka posts receive have failed to translate into actual support and numbers offline. Leading to a phenomenon one participant described as “keyboard activism.” Keyboard activism is a situation whereby internet users support a cause in the online space but hardly do anything in the actual offline world to bring about the goals of that cause to fruition. Zeynep Tufekci has again written extensively about why there is usually a disconnect between popular online social movements and actual mobilisation of supporters in the offline environment. She states that the major reason for this disconnect is because offline movements are built on steady supporter bases which are developed