If you’re even moderately active on the social media platform called X, otherwise known as Twitter, you’d attest to the fact that for a while now the platform has felt different; more volatile; a mound of dry tinder ever poised to burst into flames. The platform has always had the reputation of functioning as a virtual town hall, a melting pot of a diverse slew of opinions. As is the case with physical town halls, it was not unusual for contrasting ideas to forcefully ram into each other and ricochet in opposite directions. The platform also always had its share of troublemakers: tribal bigots, trolls, and—for lack of a better term—spectacular fools. But this dispensation in its history feels markedly fraught and perverse.
The platform has devolved from being prone to occasional conflagrations to a veritable radioactive contamination site. Regular users of the platform routinely complain about its acute toxicity and often have to enact strict safety guardrails—such as periodically deactivating their accounts or taking breaks—in a bid for self-preservation. It’s almost like the platform has perfected the act of eliciting the worst instincts in its users. Many users of the platform seem to exist in a perpetual state of anger, constantly waiting for the next victim of their wrath.
Recently, the X account of the I Said What I Said Podcast posted a video where the hosts Jola and FK satirically dissect the trend of people getting married a bit earlier than in previous years. In the video, Jola ventures into a winding albeit sublimely hilarious ramble that sees her diagnose men increasingly vaping and getting infected with STDs as the reason for this trend of earlier marriages. The gag is that there’s neither any empirical evidence that the Nigerian bourgeoisie class is getting married any earlier nor that men are increasingly vaping, the whole thing is clearly a joke. In her monologue, as if to drive home the point that her rant was lighthearted, she engaged in a bit of self-deprecation, tagging her situation as an unmarried woman at 32 as unfortunate. Somehow, though, a throng of people took it to heart, stirring a torrent of vivacious arguments and counter-arguments for days. As of the time of writing, the video has garnered around 2 million views on the platform.
This raises the question of how we collectively lost our sense of humor, our capacity for extending grace to the next person, how we lost our ability to rail against the tendency to assume the worst of others. How did we become so combative, so contentious, perennially girded up for the next skirmish?
This acute volatility that has pervaded X is not limited to Nigeria. Similar gripes abound in precincts on the platform representing other nations and cultures. In the past year, several American celebrities quit the platform in protest; Stephen King, Barbra Streisand, and Don Lemon, to name a few. When the question of how Twitter slumped into disarray is raised, Elon Musk is usually served up as the culprit. In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, following a tumultuous months-long negotiation. He has since hacked off the guardrails installed by the previous leadership and skewed the platform’s ideological disposition right-ward. But that hardly tells the full story, especially in the Nigerian context.
Twitter—on account of its status of being a virtual curia, an environment that fosters uninhibited sharing—has always reflected the ideological leanings of society. In the early 2010s, when the app was increasingly being used globally as both a gauge for social currents and a tool for resistance—its role in the 2011 Arab Spring being an example—Twitter in Nigeria was still nascent and not so much oriented towards ideological causes. There was a sizable pocket of political and ideological discourse but the Nigerian arm of the platform was mostly given to humor, pop culture debates, and emerging influencer communities. A perfect illustration of how ideologically removed this era was, is the slew of unhinged tweets that can be unearthed from that period. Peruzzi for example in a succession of now-deleted tweets made rape jokes. It wasn’t until two years ago when those tweets were rediscovered by online sleuths that he was visited with a torrent of furor. Countless examples of this stripe abound. The concept of political correctness and its adjunct—cancel culture—had yet to descend upon these parts.
By the mid-2010s however, the story would take a different turn. Prodded by global currents—The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, as well as Trump’s acerbic rhetoric—Twitter conversations in Nigeria would assume a more pronounced ideological tenor. People became more attuned to the concept of political correctness. Some people railed against this shift but there was a consensus on what constituted normal behavior and dissenters were jointly reprimanded by the public. This was the era when feminism gained ground across the gender divide. It was routine to see men affix “feminist” to their bio and make contrite tweets about their male privilege.
It would all come to a head in 2020, during the lull of the Covid lockdown and the End SARS protests. The bulk of mobilization for the protests happened on Twitter. And even though the movement purportedly had no leaders, in reality, some individuals were leading the line. The Feminist Coalition—a group of young Nigerian women, including FK Abudu and Damilola Odufuwa—formed the backbone of the organizational efforts, raising over 140 million Naira, which was used to provide food, medical care, and legal aid for the protesters. Other prominent feminists, such as Rinu Oduala, were at the forefront of the organization on social media. The movement achieved historical levels of success before it was thwarted by the Lekki Massacre, where unarmed peaceful protesters were killed in cold blood by agents of the government.
In the period leading up to the massacre, however, the government had started to hack at the upholstery of the movement through social media propaganda. Social media was flooded with misinformation and divisive rhetoric. One such rhetoric was that the Feminist Coalition had hijacked the movement and was now using it to further its furtive agenda. They were also slammed with accusations of financial impropriety—unfounded by the way as they had kept detailed accounts of their spending which they later shared with the public. This singular action unraveled a lot of the progress that had been made in sensitizing the general public to feminism and the patriarchal strictures of Nigerian society. The goal of the barrage of propaganda was to turn men against “feminists who had co-opted the movement.” It worked spectacularly well and even today its legacy still looms large. In certain corners of the platform, “feminist” is deployed as a slur. Women, in turn, are now largely suspicious of male allies, having been skewered and hung out dry by them in 2020.
During the last presidential election in 2023, the situation took a turn for the worse as propaganda-addled accounts sowed seeds of tribal divisions. The youth who had until then been largely united in their support of Peter Obi, who was seen as a harbinger of a new kind of leadership that would prioritize fiscal responsibility and youth participation, found themselves split along tribal divides. “Yoruba ronu,” which translates to “Yoruba think,” became a rallying cry for bigots. Three years after the elections and the effects of this moment still linger.
These incidents point to a larger trend that has come to define interactions on the app and is the primary vehicle for contentious discourse. The term is agenda, and it refers to a situation when a person (or a group) pushes a dishonest narrative with the aim of at once furthering their aims and causing a commotion. This behavior is rife in music conversations on the platform, such as when rival fanbases instigated the absurd rumor that Davido had arrived at the Grammys hours before it was scheduled to start and marshaled his whole team to join him in arranging the chairs. Of course, the accounts championing this narrative knew it was false if ridiculous, the whole thing was a performance aimed at stirring controversy, but unsuspecting individuals ran with it and started spinning reproving think pieces. Sometimes “agenda” takes on an insidious form where both the instigators and the general public are aware that the issue being contested is false or misleading, and yet they engage in fierce and often vindictive antagonism.
Gender-based conversations are where this concept, agenda, finds its strongest expression. Men invariably side with other men, the same goes for women, regardless of the mechanics of the conversation. In the case of Jola’s spiel, many of the men who criticized her and hurled insults knew she was joking, for them, it was just an opportunity to pile on another “feminist.” Such is the intolerance, contempt, and vitriol that has come to define behavior on the app. Not only are people unwilling to leave wiggle room for dissent and see from the perspective of the other person, but they now delight in contriving false narratives to confirm their prejudices.
Hemingway once wrote, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” Chekhov similarly wrote that “the job of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state it correctly,” and yet this piece would feel incomplete without trying to proffer solutions. The volatility on the app is somewhat by design: the algorithm amplifies divisive rhetoric to keep the chatter mill running. Unscrupulous entities—tribalists, bigots, politicians—exploit this to further their agenda. Railing against these hectoring forces may seem an impossible task but it’s up to every individual to choose the truth when they can conveniently sway to the rhythms of a lie, to choose tolerance as opposed to mindless mudslinging, to choose rationality instead of folly. Referring to the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
