guest column:Tendai Makaripe THE #RhodesMustFall protests which gripped Cape Town University in March 2015 have been engraved in the annals of South African history. RMF initially concentrated on the removal of the late colonialist Cecil John Rhodes’ statue at the centre of the university but the movement later morphed into an all-encompassing drive that sought to address colonial imbalances in education, eradicating institutional racism as well as calling for the decolonisation of the tertiary education system. Deliberations on these issues took place on several online and offline spaces but at the core of this campaign was social media use, particularly Twitter which enabled students to connect and disconnect from the campaign without having to formerly register their political interests to any political grouping. The use of hashtags facilitated users’ easy passage to where discussions were being held. Twitter thus functioned as an “information neighbourhood” which friends visit to acquire, share and communicate information. The continued online information sharing birthed offline activity which manifested itself in the form of protests. After a month of protest action, the statue was removed and fundamental issues underpinning the protest began receiving attention. This movement is not an isolated case. The Moldavian “Twitter Revolution”, the Arab Spring, Israel’s tent protests and Iran protests all have one common denominator; social media was an influential tool in mobilising people for offline action. While people like Mark Pfeifle called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for being a voice of the voiceless, others have downplayed its role in influencing real change. One such individual is Stanford-based academic Evgeny Morozov, who dismisses social media activism as an ineffective and shallow form of political activism. He calls this type of activism ‘slacktivism’ in reference to a ‘feel-good’ digital activism that lacks any socio-political impact. The debate on social media and real change has been reignited with the creation of the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter. The movement, an offshoot of the black lives matter crusade attempts to draw the world’s attention to the socio-economic and political challenges that are suffocating the Zimbabwean populace as well as calling upon leaders to value citizens’ lives. This hashtag has commanded a global following signifying the power of social media in agenda setting and facilitating information exchange. Putting this into perspective, one cannot deny the influence the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter movement has had on Twitter, but a question to ponder is: Is this movement enough to usher a change of fortune in the lives of Zimbabweans? Is it enough to fight institutionalised corruption, economic challenges, poor heath delivery system, acute poverty, cartels of looters among a litany of problems? Is it any different from other hashtags that have been created in the Zimbabwean context but died a natural death without any change to the status quo? C