When the Hashtag Became the Classroom: #EndSARS and the Learning Power of Social Media Activism

When the Hashtag Became the Classroom: #EndSARS and the Learning Power of Social Media Activism

I grew up in Nigeria. I have family there. I have friends who were on those streets in October 2020. So when I write about #EndSARS, I am not writing about a case study I encountered in a textbook. I am writing about something I watched unfold in real time, from thousands of miles away, through a phone screen, feeling every post like a pulse check on people I love.

What happened in Nigeria in 2020 is one of the most instructive examples I know of social media functioning as something far more than a communication tool. It functioned as a civic infrastructure. And if you look at it closely through the lens of what we have been studying this semester, it is also one of the most powerful demonstrations of networked learning I have ever seen.

What Started Online

#EndSARS began as a demand for the dissolution of SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a Nigerian police unit with a long record of extrajudicial violence, arbitrary detention, and targeting of young people, particularly those perceived as tech workers or creatives, for harassment and extortion. The grievances were not new. What was new was the infrastructure for collectively expressing them.

Twitter became the organizing layer. Nigerians used the hashtag to share evidence, coordinate protest locations, pool resources for lawyers and medical care, and amplify individual stories that might otherwise have disappeared into the noise. At its peak, #EndSARS became the most-shared hashtag in the world for two consecutive days, amplified by Afropop artists with tens of millions of followers and picked up by international voices across the diaspora. The protests that followed were the largest in modern Nigerian history.

The Network as Classroom

Here is where it gets interesting from a learning perspective. What was happening on Nigerian Twitter during those weeks was not just activism. It was an accelerated, distributed, high-stakes civic education.

People learned. They learned about their legal rights when detained. They learned how to document police encounters safely. They learned the locations of protest first aid stations and legal aid hotlines. They learned how to set up fundraising infrastructure, verify information before sharing it, and use a hashtag not just as a label but as a coordination mechanism. Dennen et al.'s networked knowledge activities framework maps almost perfectly onto this. Participants were collecting information, sharing it rapidly across networks, constructing collective arguments and demands, and distributing resources to people who needed them in real time.

This was not learning that anyone designed. There was no curriculum, no learning management system, no rubric. But it was learning that was urgent, purposeful, and deeply connected to outcomes that mattered to the people doing it. Salomon's point that the educational rationale counts more than the tool has never felt more true to me than when I think about how Nigerians used Twitter in those weeks. The tool was incidental. The rationale was survival and dignity.

The Government's Response Was Itself a Lesson

What happened next revealed something equally important about the power and vulnerability of networked learning spaces. From June 2021 to January 2022, the Nigerian government banned Twitter entirely. Protesters had their bank accounts restricted. Communications were intercepted. Activists faced surveillance and threats.

The ban was, in one sense, an acknowledgment of how effective the platform had been. The government understood that the network was not just a place where people talked. It was the infrastructure through which collective knowledge was built, and collective action was organized. Shutting down the platform was an attempt to shut down that infrastructure.

But here is what the ban also taught: communities that have built genuine networked knowledge do not simply stop knowing what they know when the platform disappears. Nigerians moved to VPNs. They shifted to WhatsApp. They found other channels. The knowledge and relationships that had formed through activism did not evaporate when Twitter went offline. The network had become, in a real sense, a community, and communities are more resilient than platforms.

When Twitter was eventually restored in January 2022, it came with conditions. The platform was required to register with Nigerian authorities, pay local taxes, and comply with media regulations that critics argued could be used to suppress the very speech that had made the platform significant. The lesson there is a harder one: access to networked learning spaces is not guaranteed, and the conditions of that access are always being negotiated by forces that have interests in what gets learned and shared.

What This Means for How We Think About Social Media and Learning

I think about #EndSARS often when designing learning experiences for faculty on AI adoption. The contexts are wildly different in scale and stakes. But the underlying principle is the same: the most powerful learning happens when people have a genuine reason to learn, a community to learn with, and a platform that supports the flow of knowledge between them.

Social media, at its best, can provide all three. What #EndSARS showed is that this is not hypothetical. It happened. A generation of Nigerians became more politically literate, more organizationally capable, and more connected to each other and to a global diaspora through a hashtag and a platform. That is learning. That is performance in the deepest sense of the word.

The question for those of us who design learning experiences is what we can take from that and build intentionally, because the conditions that made #EndSARS a learning movement, urgency, community, shared purpose, and open infrastructure for knowledge sharing, are conditions we can actually design for, even when the stakes are lower.

I would love to hear from others in this class who have watched social media activism unfold in their own cultural or national contexts. How did those movements function as spaces for learning and community building? 

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