by Adedayo Ademuwagun

In the last few years, the influence of social media has grown rapidly in Nigeria. More people are using social media to connect and discuss about current issues, and these discussions are visibly having a significant effect in this society.

Conversations on social media often involve a lot of people, but do the voices reflect the real opinion of the masses? Do the conversations tell us what most Nigerians really think about the issues being discussed?

Some popular social media personalities don’t think so.

Tolu Ogunlesi says, “I don’t think that it reflects the opinion of the masses, but it gives a good sense of what the majority think about a certain issue. But then I’m not sure about the extent to which this happens.”

Japheth Omojuwa says, “Social media represents the opinion of the urban, educated people. Some of these people are in diaspora, some of them are in the cities have top jobs and so on. It is true their opinions may not reflect what the masses think.

There’s insufficient data to analyse the level of social media penetration in Nigeria. But two resources that do some help are the NCC monthly subscriber data and a 2013 Business Day survey titled How Nigerians Use Social Media.

According to the NCC data, there were 127 million active GSM phone lines in April, and 66 million of these were internet active. That was 52% of the number of active lines.

This statistic is a bit sketchy, because a lot of Nigerians use multiple phone lines, and so one line wouldn’t exactly count as one individual. However, by the statistic, we can assume that some half of Nigerians were online at least once in the first quarter of this year.

The Business Day survey involved random respondents in the FCT and five states including Lagos, which had the bulk of the respondents. More than 70% were active daily on at least one of Facebook and Twitter, and about 65% were mid or top level employees.

This data and the views of top social media figures such as Ogunlesi and Omojuwa suggest that although some half of Nigerians might have internet access, the number of Nigerians who are regularly active on social media is much smaller.

More so, one deduces that the level of social media activity varies around Nigeria depending on things such as internet penetration, literacy level, and urban level. For example, there are probably more people tweeting in Lagos than in Sokoto or Ekiti.

From all of these, it makes sense to infer that those who are regularly active on social media are mostly the sophisticated, urbanised people whose views may not correspond with that of the majority in this developing society.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t discount the impact of social media on pop culture and activism in the country.

The Oga at the Top incident and the Occupy Nigeria protests are two examples.

A lot of people didn’t hear Shem Obafaiye say “my oga at the top” live on that TV show, but after people picked it up on social media and flung it around, the phrase grew popular nationwide and became the theme of everything, from songs to Tshirts. Today, it is still being used in conversations.

During the Occupy Nigeria protests, too, social media facilitated the revolt and made it less difficult for Nigerians to mobilise and circulate information about how things were coming along. In fact, some people think that the protests were the best organised in Nigerian history and that social media helped to make this happen.

Cynics have some questions, though: Are conversations on Facebook and Twitter uninfluenced? Are they free flowing? Do they happen naturally? Are there certain people — politicians, celebrities, elite activists — who direct these conversations in their interest and give the impression that they are speaking for the people?

Omojuwa says here, “Obviously, some conversations are directed by specific people. For instance, if I want to sell phones, I can start a conversation about phones. If I have an influential social media account then I can get people talking about a specific issue. But most times these discussions happen on the spur. Maybe because of something that happened in that period. So it’s mostly about everyday issues that people are talking about.”

Ogunlesi says, too, “I think it is inevitable for some discussions to be influenced. So, yes, it happens, but it is hard to know how much of it is influenced.

“Besides, people on social media are also in churches, in schools and in real communities, and they have offline lives. So most of the things they talk about are from their real experience and from what’s in the news at the time.”

Considering how the Bring Back Our Girls movement started, perhaps Ogunlesi and Omojuwa are correct.

Oby Ezekwesili had done a speech somewhere in which she challenged the government to “bring back our girls”. Then someone hashtagged it on Twitter, and from there it seemed to catch on spontaneously. Today, the whole world has heard of that case.

Even if the average person in Yenagoa, Maiduguri or Abakaliki isn’t tweeting or even online, some folks think that the social media demographic in Nigeria is fairly representative, and that this will improve with time as this society continues to develop.