Empirical Assessment of Social Media in Mobilising Voters during the 2023 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Abstract

Social media platforms are increasingly being adapted into mainstream communication systems and are useful in politics, healthcare, social movements and more. Whether it is information dissemination or mobilisation and advocacy, the platforms are considered to be largely utilised in twenty-first century. The objective of this study was to examine social media platforms as tools for voter mobilisation during the 2023 presidential conducted in Nigeria. It was anchored on the uses and gratifications theory. The researchers adopted the cross-sectional descriptive research design relying on survey as instrument of data collection. The mixed-techniques of online survey link and in-person administration techniques were leveraged to carefully distribute the survey to a determined sample of 587 respondents from the population of 9,259,968 following the multistage sampling procedures which include purposive, stratification and simple random stages. The Statistical Packages for the Social Science (SPSS) version 26 was relied upon for analysing the survey data. Findings of the study showed that there was use of social media platforms during the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria and that Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Instagram were the most prominent. The study also demonstrated that there was a greater use of the platforms during the period. Furthermore, the study also showed that social media platforms were effective tools for mobilising voters to participate in the electoral process in the 2023 presidential election. The researchers concluded that the platforms are now greatly utilised due to their importance and recommended that political parties and their candidates leverage the access and use by younger voters to use social media in future elections to mobilise the electorate.