Nigeria's #EndSARS movement and its implication on online protests in Africa's most populous country

Abstract

Modern tools of connectivity have afforded disadvantaged youth across the globe the opportunity to collectively share and curate challenges and build up strategies to protest marginalization. This argument is however sharply divided between tech‐optimists, who argue that social media remove all forms of barrier and empower average members of society and tech‐pessimists who argue that social media discourage people from actively seeking change. This article wades into this discourse by looking at the claims of police abuse by Nigerian youth on social media. For decades, police abuse of powers has remained a subject of interest in academic and human rights circles. This interest has perhaps been amplified by online social movements. In Nigeria, this abuse is well documented in the #EndSARS campaign, which has lasted for three years with little success. In disparity to most academic studies that investigate success of online movement, this study critically inspects the limitation of the #EndSARS campaign by assessing how Nigeria's political environment can serve as a possible hindrance to successful movements. This research therefore answers two questions: What are the dominant themes in Nigeria's #EndSARS campaign? What are the limitations to activism in Nigeria?

Managing natural tourism attractions based on visitor reviews: a case study of Golden Beach, Karpaz

“…Content analysis is also a useful and accepted way of uncovering key concepts and interpretations of the language in the text content (Krippendorff, 1989). The current study used both quantitative and qualitative approaches (Kim et al , 2009) as the content was quantified via arithmetical comparison (frequencies and percentages of prevalent concepts) using the SPSS statistical package (Çop et al , 2020), and a thematic analysis was used to review contextual insights, enabling supplementary plot explanations (Dambo et al , 2020).…”

A law and politics contextualization of corporate activism in Nigeria’s 2020 anti-police brutality campaign

“…Given their potential for content aggregation, information dissemination, and user mobilization, social media platforms are bound to feature prominently in any popular demonstrations nowadays (Valenzuela 2013 ; Brantly 2019 )—and so did they in Nigeria’s #EndSARS movement (Dark 2020 ). However, few would have expected one of the world’s prominent social media platforms to directly demonstrate support for the cause.…”

Transitivity and youth violence in #EndSARS discourse

“…Equally, Dambo, et al (2020) examined the interface between social media and information dissemination with respect to police brutality, and he discovered that Twitter handle plays pivotal role in connecting the Nigerian youths worldwide to #EndSARS protests, which resulted in the protests happening simultaneously both within and outside the country.…”

“…Previous studies on #EndSARS protest had examined it from sociological perspectives (egs. Dambo, et al 2020;Obogo 2020;Akinpelu 2021) and historical (eg. Orabueze, et al 2021).…”