Deviance and youth identity formation in online community a comparison of two online music communities in Nigeria

This study explores the expressions of deviance and their implications for youth identity formation within two distinct online music communities: the street music style community of Naira Marley, known for its anti-establishment values, non-conformity, and often extreme vulgar expression, and the pop music community promoting the mainstream trends of Davido. By employing qualitative methods using content and thematic analysis and deductive approach, several themes from a previous study by Sun (2022), such as online harassment, hate speech, incivility, trolling, and toxicity were examined. The results show that there is massive deviance proliferation in the online fan communities of the artists, although the case of Naira Marley’s street music style community is seen to be very high, and one of the reasons noted for that is because of the lack of regulation in the communities, the street lifestyle and the personality of the artist himself.