Against the backdrop of the recently passed Ugandan Antihomosexuality Act 2023 (AHA2023), which directly targets LGBT+ activist and their rights advocacy, this paper seeks to explore if the AHA2023 had a chilling effect on Ugandan LGBT+ activism in their key online social platform, Twitter. By comparing Twitter data sets from 2022 and 2023 quantitively and analyzing a post-AHA corpus comprising of 611 tweets qualitatively, the results indicate that AHA 2023 produced a chilling effect on the content level but not on the activity level. The AHA2023 did thus not silence Ugandan LGBT+ activists' digital activism but appears to have impacted the content in some critical ways. Most concerning, Ugandan LGBT+ activists' explicit self-penned demands for equal human rights almost disappear. Rights demands did not disappear from the Uganda LGBT+ Twittersphere butwere primarily promoted and kept alive by international development, Western bilateral partners, and human rights allies. The long-term impact of the discursive shift in Ugandan LGBT+ activism is still unfolding, and it is arguably too early to identify the impact of the aforementioned troublesome chilling effects on content. There is, however, a reason to suspect that the loss of Ugandan voices will negatively impact efforts to challenge the post-colonial amnesia that sustains erroneous beliefs around African sexuality as singularly heterosexual. This case study can serve as a critical case for understanding the chilling effects caused by heavy-handed legislation. The study also seeks to contribute methodologically by offering insights into how chilling effects in digital spaces can be studied empirically.
