The Language of Social Media Activism in Nigeria: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Feminist Twitter Campaigns

This study critically analyses the language of feminist social media activism in Nigeria, focusing specifically on the discursive strategies, rhetorical structures, and ideological work performed by feminist advocacy campaigns on Twitter between 2020 and 2023. Nigerian feminist activism has found significant expression on social media platforms following the EndSARS movement of 2020, with campaigns addressing gender-based violence, reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, and representation in governance generating substantial online engagement. The study draws on a corpus of 1,000 tweets from identified Nigerian feminist advocacy accounts and campaign hashtags, including FeminismInNigeria, ArewaMeToo, and EndGBVNigeria. Critical discourse analysis examines the construction of victim and perpetrator identities, the rhetorical management of intersectionality between gender and other social categories including class, ethnicity, and religion, the use of indigenous language elements within English-medium tweets for cultural grounding, and the mobilisation of data and personal testimony as complementary evidence strategies. Counter-discourse responses from anti-feminist Nigerian Twitter accounts are analysed comparatively to map the ideological terrain of the online gender debate. Findings reveal that Nigerian feminist Twitter activism deploys a sophisticated blend of legal-rights language, emotional personal testimony, and satirical counter-speech that reflects the global development of digital feminist discourse while remaining distinctively grounded in Nigerian social and cultural specificity. Keywords: feminist activism, social media, Twitter, critical discourse analysis, Nigeria.