Hate Speech and Linguistic Violence in Nigerian Political Discourse on Facebook: A Study of the 2023 General Elections

This study analyses hate speech and linguistic violence in Nigerian political discourse on Facebook during the 2023 general election campaigns, examining the linguistic strategies through which political actors and their supporters deploy dehumanising, ethnically charged, and religiously inflammatory language in online political communication. Nigeria's general elections are frequently accompanied by heightened inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions, and social media platforms have become primary arenas in which these tensions are linguistically mediated and escalated. The study employs a critical discourse analysis methodology, analysing a purposively selected corpus of 200 Facebook posts and comment threads from accounts affiliated with the three major political parties during the February 2023 election campaign period. Analysis focuses on dehumanisation metaphors, ethnic othering strategies, religious exclusion discourse, and the manipulation of historical grievances as political mobilisation tools. Findings reveal that hate speech in Nigerian political Facebook posts operates through both explicit slurs and more coded forms of linguistic violence including strategic ambiguity, irony, and what the study terms dog-whistle ethnolinguistics, language that signals ethnic hostility to in-group members while maintaining plausible deniability. Regional variation in dominant hate speech targets and strategies is evident, reflecting local political landscapes. The study argues that platform-specific affordances such as sharing, reactions, and algorithmic amplification significantly intensify the social reach of linguistic violence in Nigerian political contexts. Keywords: hate speech, political discourse, Facebook, Nigerian elections, critical discourse analysis.