JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE STUDIES AND ARTS

This paper investigates the pragmatics of identity and linguistic framing in Nigeria?s digital resistance, with a focus on protest and counter-protest discourses circulating across placards, tweets, and Instablogs during the End Bad Governance campaigns of August 1-10, 2024. Anchored in Mey?s (2001) Pragmatic Act Theory, particularly the strategic deployment of pragmemes and practs, and informed by Snow and Benford?s (1988) Framing Theory, the study adopts a qualitative, descriptive design to comparatively analyse twenty (20) purposively sampled extracts from online protests and counter-protests discouseis mobilized to construct collective identities, legitimize resistance, and counter-frame dissenting voices. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, the data are systematically tabulated to reveal recurring pragmatic strategies and framing devices that underpin online resistance. Findings highlight how protesters utilize irony, presuppositions, implicatures, and intertextual cues to foreground narratives of injustice and solidarity, while counter-protesters and pro-government actors reframe resistance through delegitimization, ridicule, and appeals to order. By situating these communicative acts within Nigeria?s socio-political context, the study demonstrates that digital platforms function simultaneously as sites of solidarity and contestation, where identities and ideologies are pragmatically negotiated. The article contributes to scholarship on digital activism by showing how the intersection of pragmemes, linguistic framing, and digital affordances reveals the complexity of protest-counter-protest dynamics in contemporary Nigeria

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