The Use of Social Media and Participation in Political Communication in the 2019 General Election in Nigeria

Abstract

Research findings have shown that the social media are very active in promotion of citizens’ participation in political and electoral procession in many countries. However, the Nigerian voters before the advent of the social media have been mainly receivers of information on election without being active participants in the electoral information flow. The voters did not have access to the mainstream media which had hitherto been the main conveyors of electoral information. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to examine how the electorate in Delta State, Nigeria used the social media for participation in political communication during the 2019 Nigerian general elections. The study is guided by the Technological Acceptance Model which explains how users come to accept and use a technology. The study used survey and questionnaire as method and instrument respectively to gather the data. We used both simple random sampling technique and purposive sampling technique. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results show that the voters are highly exposed to political communication in the social media; they have favourable perception of the social media usage for political communication; they prefer the social media to the mainstream media in participation in political communication; and they participate more actively in political communication during the said election through the social media more than they did previous elections through the mainstream media. We recommend that that the voters should sustain their exposure to the use of the social media for political participation so that can also be kept abreast of the happenings in the political terrain and they should continue to use the social media to interrogate political leaders, election candidates during elections and after the election period.

Keywords: Silenced electorate; Nigerian general elections; social media and elections; political participation; participation in political communication, participation in political discourse.

DOI: 10.7176/IKM/10-3-03

Publication date: April 30^th 2020