Discursive Strategies in the Tweets and Comments of Virtual #Endsars Protesters

Abstract

The #EndSars protest surfaced as a social movement that vociferously agitated the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Nigeria. While there are existing language-based literatures on formal and functional analyses of electoral campaigns, manifestoes, inaugural speeches, speeches by political icons, civil unrest and other socio-political movements; this study attempts to investigate an innovation of public protest discourse using the #EndSars tweets and comments as data. The study, therefore, examines discursive strategies in tweets and comments of virtual #EndSars protesters. One hundred (100) tweets and comments hashtagged #EndSars between October 1 and 31, 2020, were purposively extracted, representing the data for the study. Theoretical insights from Fairclough's socio-cultural approach to Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar guide the study into linguistic and discourse analyses. Findings show that tweeters and commenters employed linguistic and

discourse styles such as vocative interpersonal resource, prevalence of imperatives, repetition, praise, deictic expressions for inclusion and exclusion, allusions, slanguage, prayer, amongst others to project their focus, as well as call for youths' participation in governance with respect to 2023 elections. These discursive strategies projected by lexical and discourse elements, advance the politics of language within the context of power imbalance and abuse, extra-judicial practices, marginalisation, and other social injustices. The study concludes that virtual protesters deploy these discursive strategies to sensitise, persuade, motivate and mobilise the virtual community on the goal of the #EndSars protest, to sustain their solidarity in the struggle and to coordinate the protest.