“It’s a way to rally my inner circles and get them involved”: The Dynamics of Private Activism on WhatsApp in Nigeria

This study contributes to our understanding of how people utilized a WhatsApp group for activism in Nigeria's EndSARS movement, a protest that fights police brutality and attempts to entrench good governance. Through the digital ethnographic study of a WhatsApp group from October 20, 2021, to October 20, 2023, this article answers the question: How do the WhatsApp group members dedicated to the EndSARS movement engage in activism, and what practices do they employ to mobilize support within this digital space? Through the reflexive thematic analysis of the dataset, two themes and a subtheme were constructed to drive the results and discussion. In the first theme, the paper argues that due to WhatsApp's semi-public nature, the research participants employ the platform for one-on-one activism practice. A subtheme within this first theme, “WhatsApp Status and Activist Practices,” was also discussed. The second theme suggests that the use of WhatsApp for activism engenders the emergence of a distinct group of socio-political actors whom I termed “private activists.” Overall, this study contributes to the literature on WhatsApp as a platform for activism, specifically within the context of Nigeria, an environment characterized by the suppression of dissenting voices, and in the Global South.