Cancel culture and accountability on South African black Twitter

Abstract

This thesis critically examines cancel culture and accountability on South African Black Twitter (SABT), specifically addressing how the platform’s simplified binary discourse risks reducing complex social issues and hindering effective accountability measures. The study investigates the use of social media to hold individuals and commercial brands accountable for misconduct. The objective is to scrutinise the linguistic and discursive processes that construct, enforce, or overturn public accountability while retaining the necessary cultural and political nuance. This research employs a multiple case study approach utilising Critical Techno-Cultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), an adaptation of Fairclough’s CDA, across a sustained 2019-2024 period. The methodology involved analysing a dataset of 1,500 high-engagement tweets collected from five high-profile cancellation cases (including politician Helen Zille and corporate brand Clicks) to analyse campaign progression across different institutional targets. The core findings establish that SABT operates as a digital imbizo, characterised by moral sovereignty: accountability is negotiated via Ubuntu and Black solidarity for economic justice (Clicks) or restorative justice (Maboe). Platform affordances are strategically weaponised for political resistance, as the Zille case shows how archival surveillance affects ideological dispossession, positioning the imbizo as the ultimate decider of political legitimacy. Furthermore, techno-linguistic adaptation and other mechanisms expose significant racialised double standards, demonstrating SABT’s structural efficacy in accountability. This unique process provides an essential theoretical framework for understanding how marginalised digital publics successfully repurpose platform affordances to achieve material outcomes that bypass traditional judicial and corporate systems. This study makes a significant contribution to the field by theorising SABT’s role as a unique counter-public sphere that uses resistance to generate material and culturally resonant forms of social justice, highlighting the tension between community-led accountability and entrenched power structures.