The 2023 Nigerian presidential election was marked by an intensified use of social media for political discourse, where language played a huge role in shaping political support and opposition. The study examines how X users deploy language and linguistic resources to demonstrate support for (or against) the three major presidential candidates in the election. Adopting a descriptive qualitative design, 150 tweets from supporters of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Peter Obi, and Atiku Abubakar were purposively selected from 7,500 collected (July 2022–February 2023) via rtweet in R and analysed using van Leeuwen’s legitimation theory. The study revealed that language use by tweeters for (de)legitimation was characterised by sarcasm (irony/mockery), humour (jokes/banter), optimism (prayers), verbal aggression (threats/curses), hyperbolic statements (lies), and comparisons. Based on the tenets of van Leeuwen’s theory, the key (de)legitimation strategies deployed were authorisation (40%), rationalisation (33%), and moral evaluation (53%), with mythopoesis absent. X’s short-form constraints limiting narrative strategies and storytelling were confirmed. Overall, the findings demonstrate how supporters use language to construct political support or opposition through appeals to familiar authority and morality in Nigeria’s digital political discourse.
Olatunji et al. (Fri,) studied this question.