Old war, new battleground: deconstructing the potency of social media for community engagement in nigeria’s human rights advocacy efforts

Abstract

Although the need to guarantee human rights has been long acknowledged, efforts towards their full realization seem limited to the sole reliance on the conventional top-down approach to development. However, current development discourse emphasizes the centrality of people’s involvement in social development, such as human rights promotion, and the social media seem to hold considerable prospects in the actualization of this goal. Using a survey of 1,000 respondents drawn from states across Nigeria, this study investigates how new media technologies, such as social media, are shifting focus from the sole reliance on the mainstream media and influencing public involvement in human rights promotion in Nigeria. Findings showed that the social media have engendered community-wide engagements of people in efforts aimed at reducing cases of human rights violation in Nigeria, as people do not only get exposed to human rights issues on the social media, but also participate in their discussion and promotion. Overall, using the social media for human rights advocacy was significantly associated with respondents’ gender (.528**), education (.674**), perception (.753**), and social media exposure (.421**). Hence, there is the need for stakeholders to leverage the potentials of the social media in the promotion of people’s fundamental rights.