THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE ADVOCACY IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Social Justice Advocacy (SJA), which seeks empowerment for the marginalised, has been driven globally by social media mostly to attract attention to issues that might be ignored by traditional media. Existing studies on social media and their use in the Nigerian context have focused on social media for advocacy generally to the neglect of how they are relevant for SJA. The use of social media for advocacy in Nigeria was, therefore, examined with particular focus on the motivations, social media practices, perceptions, and charitable contributions in order to establish how influential social media are in driving SJA. Media Dependency and Media Richness theories were adopted as framework, while mixed methods design was used. Twenty-four engaged social media users and 401 advocacy organisations were purposively selected; 532 netizens were selected through volunteer sampling; 12 social media influencers were selected using snowball sampling while simple random sampling was used to select 12 out of 401 social media handlers of advocacy organisations. Survey link and interview requests were sent through social media and e-mail to the selected advocacy organisations, while the link to the survey for the social media users was posted on the timelines of social media influencers. Four sessions of focus group discussion were conducted with the selected social media users, while 12 interview sessions were conducted with social media handlers of advocacy organisations and social media influencers. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics, while qualitative data were analysed through emerging themes technique. The motivations for using social media for advocacy-related tasks include information dissemination (92.3%), collaboration (84.2%), visibility (68.3%), volunteers (67.4%), event publicity (59.3%), call to action (52%), crowdfunding (51.6%), and online petition (44.8%). Social media were used frequently (69.7%) by advocacy organisations. However, while most social media users (84.7%) employed the media to discuss social justice issues, only 23.5% of the users worked collaboratively with advocacy organisations. All the advocacy organisations and social media influencers, and most of social media users (78.6%) perceived social media as a dependable platform for SJA. Social media enhanced charitable contributions such as awareness raising/sharing/retweeting (75.1%), feedback (69.7%), debates/engagements (60.2%), and financial donation (56.5%) as components of SJA. Majority of the advocacy organisations (94.2%) admitted that social media were influential in driving SJA, 86.4% believed that information obtained from social media was beneficial, while 82.1% believed that social media were making advocacy organisations more successful. Participants also noted that social media driven SJA, especially with the benefits of social media attributes such as virality, convergence, honest feedback and accelerated global access, was more effective than when it was done exclusively through the traditional media. The low cost of social media was also cited as one of the reasons for their wide deployment and effectiveness in SJA. Despite low collaboration between social media users and advocacy organisations in Nigeria, social media have been successfully employed to drive social justice advocacy-related tasks by encouraging charitable contributions that could empower the less privileged. There should be more consistent engagements between advocacy organisations and netizens.