The democratization process in Nigeria witnesses a digitalizedera of unprecedented campaigns. Citizens engaged in the promotion of their favorable candidates and to some extent vilifying others. In the contemporary dynamic society, we encounter and make use of an enormous variety of visual media.Many Nigerians used the social media during the 2015 election to express their political interests. Facebook appears to be gaining ground as one of the social media tremendously used by Nigerians. One of the issues that bedevil the social media usage in connection with the Nigerian 2015 Election campaigns included the creation, uploading and sharing of internet memes of the leading presidential candidates.This study discussesthe application and implications ofinternet memes as a tool for election campaigns. The paper highlights the usage of photograph memes on the two leading presidential candidatesduring Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential election. It is guided by the visual rhetoric of multi-participant popular online content theories in the analysis. Using content analysis on the premise of qualitative methods, this study finds the various ways in which internet memes were used to include attack, defense, digression, dissemination of sensitive information, among others. The article concludes that the Internet Memes served as an avenue for direct political communication which remarkably contributed to the citizen democratic engagement by candidates, politicians, citizen journalists, public relations practitioners and the general public.
Umar Jibrilu Gwandu (Sun,) studied this question.