Africa Table: Facebook's Free Basics and digital civil society in Africa.

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Facebook's Free Basics and digital civil society in Africa.

Toussaint Nothias postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford University.

Toussaint Nothias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the University of Leeds. His research explores journalism, social media and civil society in Africa. He has conducted interviews among foreign correspondents to understand how the global image of Africa is produced. He has also done research with Kenyan journalists to examine their work practices and the impact of social media on their reporting of elections, terrorism, and the ICC investigation in Kenya. At CAS, Toussaint developed with  Zineb Oulmakki a sharable, open-source tool at the intersection of technology, journalism, and scholarship. The Africa Stereotype Scanner (ASTRSC) deploys digital technologies to scan for damaging stereotypes and implicit biases in reporting about Africa. In 2017, Toussaint organized the workshop “African Media Studies in the Digital Age” and in 2018 he received the Stuart Hall Award from the IAMCR for his work on Twitter in Kenya.