Motivations for Social Media Use and Consumption in Zambian Online Platforms

Framing The Question

Debates about social media engagement and participation that have emerged in the wake of proliferated advanced technological tools in much of sub-Sahara Africa often take a Manichean prism. A schism exists between those that perceive social media as skewing the behaviors of people that actively participate online (Kubheka, 2017; Ephraim, 2013; Burton & Mutongwizo, 2009) versus those that see it as a panacea to a number of things, including participatory democracy (Bosch, 2017; Wamuyu, 2017; Nyamnjoh, 2015; Chatora, 2012). Such a prism extends to the current debates on ‘fake news’ and the questions of whether social media could be blamed for such (Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019) – therefore, alleging that platform owners I indulge in practices that tend to exacerbate homophily and polarizations across political and tribal affiliations. Against such a backdrop is the question of the kind of content published and whether people do actually believe and consume it whenever it comes to their disposal. For example, in an experimental study involving Zambia and Tanzania’s social media platforms, Gondwe (2018) observed that people in these two countries were skeptical about most stories from social media, and that their participation in the consumption of online content did not entail believability and trustworthiness.