Paper short abstract:

While doing digital ethnography in Kenya's social media sphere, the co-creative space of WhatsApp conversations with research participants showed a new epistemic pathway to understand post-truth, digital colonialism and networks of communicative relationships for activism.

Paper long abstract:

When conducting digital ethnography in African settings, this paper argues for the use of collaborative methodologies such as co-creation. In order to bring forward new epistemic pathways that challenge digital colonialism, it is necessary to align digital media scholarship with tools and methods from the Global South. I reflect on the experience of co-creation as a strategy to limit power dynamics, circumvent platform capitalism and solve the discomforts of undertaking digital ethnography, based on my own fieldwork as part of my Master's thesis. Acknowledging the limitations of the digital sphere such as anonymity, site architecture and surveillance, WhatsApp allowed participants to partake in the research as co-producers of knowledge. Through collaboration and the "scroll-back" method (Robards & Lincoln, 2019), participants' inputs helped build the online field (i.e. a Twitter profile for the research) and drive the topic with alternative sources of knowledge (reports, news, opinions, datasets…). Co-creation, I believe, enabled my research to portray a type of youth online activism that I refer to as "explanatory activism", a form of political knowledge circulation and dissection that allows young Kenyans to navigate online post-truth and political manipulation. I conclude that methodological sensitivity is critical for decolonising digital media work as it can adapt research to include localised appropriations of technology (Schoon et al., 2020) and help understand African digital experiences.