Decentralizing Social Media: An Examination of Blockchain-based Social Media Adoption and Use based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)

The study conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 early adopters of blockchain-based social media (BSM) platforms to understand their reasons for using these emerging platforms and to compare their usage with mainstream social media (MSM) platforms like Facebook and TikTok. Guided by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model, the manual content analysis of the interviews reveals that users' adoption of BSM platforms is primarily motivated by social influence, financial incentives, and a desire to bypass the content moderation policies implemented by MSM. At the same time, the steep learning curve, security and privacy concerns hinder the widespread adoption of these platforms. Finally, the study validates the suitability of the UTAUT model for examining the adoption and use of BSM platforms, but it also proposes to include two new factors, namely financial incentives and content moderation.