A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Misinformation Resilience in African Media Ecosystems

This study develops an original theoretical framework for understanding misinformation resilience in African media ecosystems, using Nigeria as the primary empirical context. Global misinformation research has generated significant theoretical progress, including diffusion of misinformation models, cognitive processing theories, and social identity-based sharing explanations, but these frameworks have been predominantly developed from Western empirical contexts that do not adequately account for the distinctive features of African media environments. This study argues that a theoretically adequate account of misinformation in Africa must incorporate community oral communication traditions, extended family WhatsApp network architectures, the role of religious and traditional authority in information credibility assessment, low baseline news literacy, and postcolonial information distrust as structural variables not adequately theorised in existing frameworks. The study employs a multi-phase mixed-method design combining computational analysis of misinformation network structures in Nigerian social media (Phase 1, n = 2.4 million posts), a nationally representative survey of 1,200 Nigerian adults measuring misinformation exposure, belief, and sharing (Phase 2), structural equation modelling of proposed theoretical relationships (Phase 3), and expert theoretical workshop validation (Phase 4). Findings contribute six original theoretical propositions about misinformation dynamics in African media systems that modify and extend existing Western models. The study advances media effects theory into the global South context, provides original empirical grounding for an African misinformation resilience theory, and recommends its adoption as the foundational framework for future misinformation research in Nigeria and comparable African media environments.

Keywords: misinformation theory, African media ecosystems, Nigeria, resilience, theoretical framework.