Methodologically, the paper combines digital ethnography with a media-archaeological approach that traces continuities between contemporary platform politics and earlier regimes of persuasion in Nigeria. From colonial intelligence gathering and rumor management, through post-civil war psychological operations, pamphleteering, and cassette-based political publicity, Nigerian statecraft has long relied on informal intermediaries who translate elite political contests into vernacular forms. The 2023 election reveals the digitized afterlife of these practices rather than a sharp rupture.
Drawing on interviews with student content creators, party volunteers, and gig workers, the paper shows how meme production and video circulation became forms of political labor. Small payments, airtime, and access to patronage networks incentivized participation, blurring distinctions between political conviction, economic survival, and risk management. Participants rarely described themselves as propagandists; instead, they understood their actions as hustle, civic vigilance, or routine online engagement. Propaganda thus operated through participation rather than command.
By historicizing digital misinformation within the longue durée of postcolonial governance, this study challenges explanations that attribute electoral propaganda primarily to foreign interference or technological novelty. Instead, it demonstrates how contemporary platform infrastructures extend older logics of rule in which rumor, spectacle, and mediated performance are central to political authority. Nigeria’s 2023 election offers a historically grounded case for rethinking propaganda not as top-down transmission, but as an everyday practice through which power is negotiated on the ground.
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