Is Social Media Platform a Recipe for Ethnic conflicts? Lessons for Zambia

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: 1, Kwame Nkrumah University, language: English, abstract: The popularisation of social media through platforms such as Facebook has seen a corresponding increase in fake news, disinformation and hate speech in recent years. In some countries, social media platforms are being used as a tool to foment ethnic conflicts. The central argument of this study, therefore, is that Zambia is slowly diving into ethnic divisions propelled by unregulated social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp. A scoping review was conducted on the role of social media in ethnic conflicts and its potential to disrupt state-building in Zambia. A comprehensive literature search was conducted on social media platforms as part of the scoping review. The study is informed by BojanBlagojevic's (2009) model to understand the causes and complexity of the ethnic conflict.