Challenges of Female Activists and the Use of Social Media for 2023 Presidential Election in Nigeria

2026-04-02T02:27:25+00:00

Social media have galvanising impact on feminists’ issues, serving as tools for political communication and mobilisation. In amplifying gender equity in political seats, Nigerian female activists were often subjected to multiple barriers, hindering the attainment of the SDG5. Previous studies in communication of gender equity have focused on how the Nigerian female activists utilised the use of social media to raise this call. However, there is a dearth of literature on the challenges encountered by female activists while engaging social media for more women participation in politics. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the challenges encountered by female activists in the use of Social Media for 2023 Presidential election in Nigeria, with a view to establishing the extent of difficulties faced. Uses and Gratification and Patriarchy Hegemony theories were used as the framework while the qualitative design was adopted. Datareportal 44.7 percent of Nigeria’s social media users were female out of which existed Nigerian female activists. Fifteen female activists were purposively selected with snowball sampling also adopted. In-depth interview was adopted in eliciting responses using interview guide as research instrument. The findings reveal the female activists encountered cyber bullying and online threats, disinformation and misinformation, tribal bullying and patriarchal dominance, defamatory comments, hacking and account and suspension to the extent of having technical and financial barriers.

Quantum Enhanced Multimodal Analysis of Political Polarization on TikTok: A Case Study of Ethiopia’s Digital Public Sphere

2026-05-16T04:28:03+00:00

Ethiopia's political landscape, characterized by ethnic federalism and the National Dialogue process, faces escalating polarization amplified by TikTok's algorithmically curated content. Traditional machine learning approaches struggle to capture the quantum-like dynamics of political discourse, superposition of identities, entanglement of ethnic and ideological factors, and context-dependent meaning. This study introduces the first quantum-enhanced multimodal framework for analyzing political discourse on Ethiopian TikTok, integrating quantum entanglement-driven fake news detection (Q-ALIGNer), quantum LSTM sentiment analysis, and quantum frequency-based opinion shift modeling (OpinionXf). We developed a hybrid quantum-classical pipeline processing 50,000 Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, and English TikTok videos. Q-ALIGNer encodes text, video, and audio modalities as quantum states with entanglement-based fusion. Quantum LSTM captures temporal sentiment evolution, while OpinionXf models opinion shifts using frequency-domain transformations. Performance was evaluated against classical baselines using 10-fold cross-validation. Q-ALIGNER achieved 92.5% accuracy, outperforming classical models by 8.2–13.9%, with only 4.6% accuracy drop under adversarial attack versus 11.9% for classical models. Quantum LSTM achieved 89.7% accuracy with 15.2% MAE reduction over AfriBERTa. Sarcasm detection improved by 8.4% and coded political language by 9.1%. OpinionXf achieved 85.7% precision and 100% recall for 72-hour early warning, detecting shifts 3–6 days before classical models. Ablation study revealed quantum layers contributed 46.3% and entanglement 53.7% of total performance gain. Entanglement-based similarity maps revealed three political actor clusters with intra-cluster entanglement 0.85–0.92 versus inter-cluster 0.65–0.72. Quantum-enhanced frameworks significantly improve detection of misinformation, sentiment polarization, and opinion shifts in Ethiopian political discourse, enabling proactive early warning systems. Deploy the 3-layer quantum model with all-to-all entanglement for Ethiopia's National Dialogue Commission, prioritizing high-persuadability local issues while approaching identity-based topics through deliberative processes.

Polit Journal Scientific Journal of Politics

Challenges of Female Activists and the Use of Social Media for 2023 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Quantum Enhanced Multimodal Analysis of Political Polarization on TikTok: A Case Study of Ethiopia’s Digital Public Sphere