Digital Indecency and Civic Decline: Communitarianism and the Ethics of Social Media Use in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe

This study examines the spread of indecent and ethically problematic content in Zimbabwe's social media sphere, focusing on Chinhoyi as a small-city public arena under civic and moral strain. Circulating media include accident gore, non-consensual nudity, recordings of abuse, and humiliating portrayals of vulnerable persons. Framed by communitarianism, digital citizenship, and anomie, the study asks whether these practices signal a breakdown of civic virtue, public empathy, and moral restraint. A qualitative design combined purposive content analysis of 120 indecent items with semi-structured interviews with 40 adult users and four focus group discussions. Analysis shows that indecent sharing is driven by mixed motives – awareness-raising, humour, moral policing, clout-seeking and boredom – and sustained by the attention economy, cumulative desensitisation, performative cruelty, and weak digital ethics. Offline norms of hunhu or ubuntu (communal personhood or relational humanity) are unevenly extended online, producing generational and gendered tensions and a form of