Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Audiences’ Comments: Insights From The Channels TV’s Facebook Audiences’ Comments On Farmers-Herders Conflicts News Stories in Nigeria

This paper interrogated The Channels TV Facebook audiences’ discourse on selected top five farmer-herder violent conflicts related news stories from January 1st to July 31st, 2018 in Nigeria. We specifically examined how the audience enacted, reproduced, and/or resisted social power abuse and dominance in their discourses on the selected news stories and their act of stancetaking. We did this by drawing on Van Dijk’s principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Du Bois’s acts of stancetaking. We analyzed 84 (out of the 500) comments and images that directly or indirectly made reference to Fulani Ethnic Group (FEG). Finding revealed that besides lack of access to discourse control by FEG; online audiences’ discourses were crafted to enact or reproduce socio dominance against FEG using the strategies of generalized “positive self-representation” and “negative representation of Others.” Findings also showed that the commenters aligned with and amplified existing stances like Fulanization/Islamization, political conspiracy, leadership failure, and the need to disintegrate the country into smaller governable sizes in their comments. We therefore concluded that such thread of discourse that generalized criminal acts of few individuals on the entire ethnic group could be inimical to the nation’s goal of national integration, security objectives, and continued peaceful and harmonious co-existence among various ethnic groups in Nigeria and therefore called for further investigation into why the online audiences approached the issues as they did in their discourses.