The Pragmatics of Political Deception on Facebook

Introduction

Facebook, an intrinsic part of twenty-first century social realities where actively cognitive participatory activities are largely captured, is consistently explored for deceptive engagements, especially in the political enterprise in Nigeria. The effect of technological advancement in communication and information sharing is significantly cognitive. This is noticeable in the political discourse through social networks. Hence, the high rate of political deception on this social media platform creates suspicion in the Nigerian political space, given the number of Facebook users in the country. Therefore, the strategic use of language and other semiotic resources in the new media such as Facebook, where anonymity and quick widest public coverage of communication are guaranteed by politicians, have moved politicking to another level. It is a level where the masses, who are mostly Facebook users, are largely engaged, and are carried away by emotions and unalloyed loyalty for their political parties; thereby making online deception by politicians much harder to detect in most cases. Technically, this form of deception is usually done technologically using multimodal features and other fabricated means to exploit the cognitive system of the Facebook users for deceptive purpose. Another importance of Facebook as it relates to politics is that it facilitates the political messages to reach the target audience in the fastest way possible (ALsamydai and Rudaina, 2010) given the number of citizens who dominate the voting population that are on the social media. Therefore, understanding how political deceptive campaign is practised in Nigerian social-cyber space remains a significant challenge worthy of scholarly investigation. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate political deceptive contents and pragmatic strategies in the sampled political Facebook posts.