Socio-political activism and its relationship with digital media diffusion is an ongoing subject of considerable debate among observers and scholars globally. This work creates a research trajectory on Nigeria by investigating the contributions of social media in the implementation of The Church Must Vote campaign. It examines the effects of connective action and clicktivism on political mobilization and evaluates how Christians used social media to increase their civic vitality during the 2019 general elections. A total of 6,951 online content, including 42 YouTube videos posted by the users of the hashtag, #thechurchmustvote, were explored via social networking analysis. Findings show that social media played a significant role in the success of the campaign and served as education channels to advise Christians on the need to participate in the elections. The impressive outcome elicits the recommendation that Nigerians should consider hashtag activism or clicktivism as a valuable political engagement system.

This study explores how Nigerians used social media platforms to mourn and memorialize protesters who were killed during the 2020 EndSARS protests in Nigeria. Data for this study are from tweets (N = 67,678) that were scraped from the hashtags, “#EndSARSMemorial2” and “LekkiMassacre” and online semi-structured interviews (N = 30) with digital activists in Nigeria. Results show that the most frequently tweeted words were “rest in peace,” “heroes,” “who gave the order,” and “#EndSARSMemorial2.” Five themes emerged from the interview data, and they include anger and sympathy, mourning and remembering, connecting in the shared humanity of the deceased, and pledges to be better humans and citizens. The paper shows that high centrality, high density of reciprocity, and low modularity illustrate online mourners’ ability to stimulate commonality through decentralized and loose networks that allow for solidarity building during mourning and the personalization of mourning. Evoking some aspects of crisis network effects theory, this study concludes that when collective mourning occurs, individuals have more reciprocal relationships on a dyadic level and that the network has low modularity as such a network effect occurs when there is a shock that creates uncertainty in the system.