Digital Activism Strategies in Citizen-Led Campaigns on TikTok and X: Evidence from Kenya's 2024 Finance Bill Protests

Abstract

This study examined digital activism strategies in citizen-led campaigns on TikTok and X during Kenya's 2024 Finance Bill protests. While digital activism is increasingly central to contemporary protest, little remains known about how distinct platform affordances systematically shape youth mobilisation across short-form video and text-based networks during political crises in the Global South. To address this gap, the study employed a convergent mixed-methods design, analysing 100 social media posts from the hashtags #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #OccupyParliamentKE (50 TikTok and 50 X posts) alongside 14 qualitative interviews with activists, influencers, civil society representatives, and parliamentary officials. Grounded in Connective Action Theory and Public Sphere Theory, the study revealed that citizen-led digital activism operated through personalised, decentralised, and platform-specific communication strategies that collectively produced large-scale visibility and civic engagement. Quantitative content analysis identified five dominant content categories: informational or explanatory posts, protest documentation, satirical and meme-based commentary, mobilisation messages, and civic education content. Platform-specific findings indicated that TikTok primarily facilitated visual storytelling and simplified complex policy issues. Meanwhile, X enabled real-time discourse, political commentary, and coordinated hashtag activism. Engagement analysis showed that mobilisation-oriented content recorded the highest mean interaction levels. Ultimately, the findings show that digital activism in Kenya is inherently platform-dependent. It recommends that civil society organisations and digital activists use cross-platform strategies that combine TikTok’s visual/affective simplification with X’s real-time discursive coordination to maximise civic education, sustain public pressure, and protect decentralised campaign credibility.