SOCIAL MEDIA AND HATE SPEECH: “FULANISATION” OF THE NIGERIAN INFORMATION SPACE BETWEEN 2015 AND 2023

Abstract

The invention of different information dissemination technologies, along with the solutions they provided, created avenues for spreading polluting messages. From the oral tradition era to when Johan Gutenberg invented the Movable Types, and into the present, chauvinistic messages have persisted across human interactions. Social media spaces, which are one such innovations, inadvertently, exacerbated these phenomena. Individuals and communities are physically attacked and stigmatised because of hateful and disparaging contents published about their personhoods, cultures, and beliefs. Hate speeches, done along ethnoreligious lines, and carried via the vehicle of politics, typified Nigeria’s complexion of this problem during the democratic dispensations under former president Muhammadu Buhari, from 2015 to 2023. This paper examined the role of opinion merchants on social media platforms in shaping hate narratives within Nigeria’s information space during that period, and how digital platforms facilitated the construction, circulation, and normalisation of the “Fulanisation” agenda. Based on Two-Step Flow Theory of the media, the paper thematically posited that Nigeria seemingly drifted, in a similar manner as failed states like Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Vile contents fuelled already frosty relationships between different Nigerian ethnic and religious communities while the government sat back to either take sides or do nothing. The use of social media by some Nigerians who paraded themselves as opinion leaders and