This article aims to understand the political impact of social networking
platforms on the general elections in Mozambique held on 15 October 2014.
It focusses on how electoral observation and monitoring were carried out in
Mozambique using online tools, and is based on an ongoing research project
exploring young people in politics in Mozambique through the internet.
It uses a qualitative approach of both interviews and digital ethnography
to sketch the landscape of online electoral observation in Mozambique.
The positions here are the result of abstraction and generalisation – the
particular positions of individuals or groups will only ever approximate
these generalised positions, which are reconstructed from the complexity
of everyday situated experience. As a preliminary conclusion, we have
noted that the internet allows the emergence of new perspectives in political
participation in Mozambique, despite its limited access to the internet.