HATE SPEECH AND NATIONAL SECURITY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY OF ETHNOPOLITICAL RHETORIC ON NIGERIAN TWITTER (2019–2025)

This study examines the relationship between hate speech and national security through a Critical Discourse Analysis of ethnopolitical rhetoric on Nigerian Twitter between 2019 and 2025. Anchored on Critical Discourse Analysis and Securitisation Theory, the study conceptualises online hate speech as both a linguistic practice embedded in power relations and a political mechanism through which social issues are framed as existential threats. Drawing on a qualitatively constructed Twitter corpus covering elections, mass protests, separatist agitations, and periods of national unrest, the study analyses how ethnoreligious identities are discursively mobilised in digital political communication. Using purposive sampling and thematic discourse coding, the analysis reveals recurring strategies of othering, collective blame, historical grievance mobilisation, and threat construction that normalise hostility and legitimise exclusion. The findings demonstrate that hate speech on Nigerian Twitter is not incidental but patterned and amplified by platform affordances, elite participation, and securitising narratives that transform political disagreement into identity-based antagonism. The study concludes that ethnopolitical hate speech on social media has significant implications for national cohesion, democratic dialogue, and security governance in Nigeria, and it calls for discourse-sensitive regulation, context-aware platform moderation, and sustained civic media literacy as key interventions.