Digital connectivity in the desert: A digital geography of social media adoption, mobility, and pastoral space among transhumant communities in southern Morocco

Mobile pastoralists in the arid south of Morocco have rapidly adopted WhatsApp and Facebook, though network coverage across their rangelands is fragmented, and absent in the remotest zones. How does this reshape the space of pastoral life? Rural studies has examined digital connectivity mainly among settled populations awaiting infrastructure; this study takes the opposite case — a rural population itself in motion — to ask what that means for connectivity. Drawing on a six-month inventory of the groups these communities use, direct observation of fifteen of them (all ten Facebook groups and five of the fifteen WhatsApp groups), and seventeen interviews (August 2025–January 2026), it documents twenty-five groups across six types, distinguishing groups observed directly from those reconstructed only through interviews and administrator accounts and thus advanced as indicative. Adoption was rapid and practical, spreading through family ties; the groups now sustain a continuously updated commons of shared rangeland intelligence in Hassaniya voice notes, alongside digitally revived solidarity and livestock-recovery institutions and home-grown connectivity workarounds culminating in shared satellite-internet hubs where terrestrial networks fail. The central argument is a double movement: communities adopted these platforms to serve existing needs and, in doing so, unintentionally transformed them — reshaping tribal authority, commercial and matrimonial practice, and the basis on which pastoral knowledge is trusted. The study offers a working framework for the digital geography of transhumance — a pastoral space stretched across scales and co-produced by movement and partial connectivity — and a contribution to how rural studies understands connectivity where the rural is itself mobile.