Mobile Internet and Contentious Politics in Nigeria: Using the Organisational Tools of Mobile Social Networking Applications to Sustain Protest Movements

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interestig piece that has possibilities.  The survey data was captured during a critical period of the initial rise of the social movement.  The twitter data set has some merit as well, but the two studies need to be discussed sequentially rather than crammed togeter in the results and discussion. See additional suggestions below.

The literature review is more exhaustive than it needs to be.  It should be trimmed to provide key references rather than providing a long string of references for each citation.  You need more space devoted to methods, results and discussion.  To avoid making the piece too long, some reduction of the literature review is needed.

Discuss each study in turn.

Research question and methods for the survey.
then results of the survey.
then discussion.  You would then show how study 1 feeds into study 2.

Under demographics, you have a very educated sample. You need to give a little discussion to this.  Note, that the lack of variation in education, pretty  much guarantees that education will not enter as a predictive indicator of anything because of its restricted range.  You should run the analysis again without this variable.   More importantly, is there evidence that the activists in this emerging movement were highly educated.  Provide some indication that your snowball sampling procedure was not systematically biased toward highlt educated individuals.  For this kind of research, a random sample is impossible and not necessary, but a little discussion of whether puts strict limits on the generalizeability of the results is needed.

You need to justify your dependent variable for research question 1.  Why is the day when a person joined the protest a theoretically important outcome variable? Briefly explain.

Why do you think that the social media variables worked out in the order that they did?   Mobilizing a vanguard activist core for protes thatt would seem to be best conducted in private forums where as the "documentation" and stirring outrage about injustice requires apps that are easily accessible and provide maximum distribution.  Discuss how the characteristics of the four the media contribute to your findings of their relative importance in predicting when people join the movement.

In the discussion of the survey results, specifically state how your survey findings advance our knowledge of communication and social movements.
Then discuss how study 1 sets up your interest in study 2.

Repeat the same structure for study 2-discussion question and method. followed by results, and then followed by discussion of study 2 results.  You should add or break out a question regarding how tightly coupled the network is.  So you will have two research questions for study 2..

In the methods section, introduction to study 2, you should discuss what different kinds of patterns one might find in the network analysis and why this is informative.  How would a highly communicative network compared one in which you have "lazy activism".  Then you can show how your results show that socisl media via twitter is an interactive whole when it comes to mobilizing anger and outrage beyond the activist core.

For study 2 we also need a clear description of how Netlytic identifies themes and validates themes.  Are the themes generated by counting particular words?  Is there an embedded dictionary for emotion words or sentiment analysis. 

Were facebook posts part of the thematic analysis?  This was unclear to me.  If facebook posts were included, how they integrated with the tweets in the database?

Do a careful reread of the manuscript.  In lines 56-59, you  have an unfinished sentence  Consider whether you can find simpler words to replace concepts like 'mundanity".  Recheck the date on line 150, as you have a 2022 date recorded for the first year of protest-I think you mean a 2020 date.  Line 304, I think 'closed-ended questions" is a better descriptor and mandatory questions.

Best wishes.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please find the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper analyses the use of different social media and digital platforms during #EndSARS protests and #EndSARSMemorial2 to explore (1) how the use of these digital tools contributed to engaging in the protest and (2) how they have served to sustain and remember the initial mobilization on its second anniversary.

The article is relevant as it contributes to the literature on the use of digital tools in social movements from a context that has been little explored. It also highlights the authors' methodological approach, given its interpretation through quantitative and qualitative data.

The text is clear and well-presented. The results are relevant.

In the interest of improving the final version of the manuscript, we propose the following comments to the authors:

1. Include references from the literature that support some assertions. Specifically:

1.a. "It has also been argued that digital protest movements are organized and mobilized via mobile networks, particularly, in developing nations." (33-34).

1.b. "Many contentious politics studies have uncovered digital media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and mobile social networking applications such as WhatsApp, when used, facilitates the organization and documentation of protests." (52-54).

 

2. Simplify the wording of some ideas that may be redundant in the text. Specifically:

2.a. "In this study, mobile internet will be used to describe all internet access and digital media access done through internet enabled mobile phones. All mobile social networking applications and even social media platforms are accessed via mobile phone are referred to as mobile internet." (46-49).

2.c. "The highlight of the protest was when a thirty-year-old graduate declared that he did not regret joining the 2020 #EndSARS protests despite losing his leg (Adefemi, 2022). Mr Stephen Ohaima is a Youth Corps 166 Member. He bravely showed his amputated leg after allegedly shot by soldiers during the protests in 2020. His amputated leg did not cower him as he talked about his happiness to have been part of those that forced the government to disband SARS." (164-169).

2.c. "This study adopted a qualitative content analysis technique and specifically utilized social media network analytics (Bryman, 2012, 2016). Using Netlytic, the researcher analysed tweets and retweets from the hashtag “#EndSARSMemorial2” to determine the number of tweets and retweets as well as Facebook posts and comments to evaluate the themes from the tweets and posts on how digital activists in Nigeria showed their solidarity to those that died during the 2020 #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria.

This study analysed 67,691 tweets, and retweets from the hashtag #EndSARSMemorial2. These tweets were collected between October 19, 2022, to October 24, 2022. Tweets were scraped and analysed using Netlytic. The tweets were subsequently imported into an NVivo 12 Pro for analysis. The aim here, is to evaluate the themes that emerged from these tweets and comments about the second anniversary of the killing of protesters in Lekki Tollgate, Lagos Nigeria during the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria." (309-320).

 

3. Check the syntactic concordance of some sentences. Specifically:

"The over reliance on ‘frontstage’ digital media platforms and the underappreciation and relevance of ‘backstage’ activist practices and the ubiquity and integration of mobile social networking applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Badoo, 2go etc. in protest movements (Baulch et al., 2020; Treré, 59 2020)." (56-60).

 

4. Unify the criteria for the use of quotation marks. In some places, there are double quotation marks ("), and, in others, single quotation marks (').

 

5. It would be advisable to put some of the authors' statements in quotation marks when describing the role played by state forces or the motivations of the protesters. For example, 'highhandedness' (131), 'callousness', (138), and 'bravely' (167), among others. This is important in order to distinguish the discourses of the actors from the authors' analytical reflection.

 

6.  There are some small typographical errors. For example, 'their demands This study' (no period, 118), 'the US Ireland, South' (no comma, 142), 'solders' (instead of 'soldiers', 153), 'action, It has' (no period, 188), 'Harcourt. eight' (instead of 'Eight', 298), among others. We recommend a careful reading of the manuscript and correction of these errors. It is also essential to check for double spaces in the text.

Author Response

Please find the attached file for my response to the Reviewers.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The author has made the nearly all of the changes that I requested.  The one exception is I would still like a paragraph describing how the themes in study 2 were ascertained.  I know that the researcher used NVIVO, but it is not clear whether the tweets were coded manually or with some sort of sentiment analysis procedure.  Coding nearly 70 k tweets manually would be a very challenging task.  Clarifying this would be helpful.

Author Response

Pleas

Author Response File: Author Response.docx