Mental health and emotional labour: evidence from the EndSARS digital protest
Article information
Abstract
This study examines how protesters in the EndSARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) movement experienced and managed mental health challenges, and how these experiences impacted their online advocacy and psychological well-being. Through interviews with 19 protesters, this research reveals three themes: (a) emotional exhaustion and trauma exposure, (b) online harassment and fear of repression, and (c) burnout and disengagement, which answered the research question. The findings highlight how social and digital media, while instrumental in mobilizing dissent, also functioned as a vector for psychological harm. The paper argues that the intimate act of digitally screening out deceased victims of police brutality and identifying with them as comrades rather than anonymous casualties highlights a collectivized form of emotional labor rooted in relational proximity and shared struggle, especially in the African context, where communal ontologies prevail. By focusing on protesters’ mental health, this study challenges idealized perceptions of digital activism, emphasizing its hidden human costs. The EndSARS case offers critical insights into the challenges of mental health in digital resistance, underscoring the importance of addressing this issue within social justice movements.
Introduction
In 2020, social media played a significant role in mobilization and amplifying the EndSARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) protest, a youth-led movement against Nigeria’s SARS, a police department known for extortion, torture, and extrajudicial killings (Ekumaoko & Ezemenaka, 2024). During the peak of the protest, specifically on 20 October 2020, at a popular protest site, the Lekki Tollgate, Lagos, military forces allegedly shot at unarmed protesters (Obeagu & Gbaden, 2025). Social media played a crucial role in documenting the shooting incident (Udenze, 2025). Having participated and researched End SARS, investigating the mental health of the protesters (participants of this study) becomes critical for the author. While research (Aboh, 2024; Udenze, 2024, 2025; Uwalaka, 2024) has focused on how the protest was organized, its socio-political significance, and how social media was deployed, the challenge of mental health and emotional labor borne by protesters remains understudied. Consequently, this study addresses the twofold research question: How did protesters who participated in digital activism during the EndSARS protest experience and manage mental health challenges, and how did their experiences shape their online advocacy efforts and mental well-being?
This research emerges at a vital juncture, as the participants of this study, who protested both offline and through digital platforms, now navigate complex post-activism realities marked by burnout, hypervigilance, and in some cases, complete disengagement from activist media and content. In this article, I argue that the movement’s heavy reliance on digital tools enabled the documentation of the Lekki Tollgate shooting but also exposed participants to challenges of mental health, emotional labor, and burnout. Through interviews with 19 purposively selected protesters who participated in the EndSARS protest, the analysis of data identified three themes which describe how engaging in activism on digital and social media platforms contributes to the mental health challenges faced by the participants. These themes are: (a) Emotional exhaustion and trauma exposure, (b) Online harassment and fear of repression, (c) Burnout and disengagement. By centring protesters’ mental health as a scholarly concern, this work challenges romanticized notions of digital activism that obscure its health toll. The EndSARS experiences offer crucial insights in this contemporary age, where digital resistance is becoming increasingly popular yet also hazardous and unsafe.
Digital activism and emotional labor
Digital activism, the use of digital platforms for social and political advocacy, has transformed how people and organizations engage in activism and social justice causes. While digital tools enable mobilization and global reach, they also impose significant emotional labor on participants. Emotional labor, a concept originating from Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) work on service workers, refers to the effort required to manage and express emotions according to social expectations. In digital activism, this labor includes moderating online spaces, coping with harassment, sustaining motivation, and performing affective solidarity (Campos & da Silva, 2024; Luther, 2025). Digital activism often requires sustained engagement with distressing content, including police violence, hate speech, and systemic oppression. Activists and protesters must navigate the emotional challenge of constant exposure to trauma while maintaining an outward stance of resilience (Tufekci, 2017). For example, during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the EndSARS movements, activists and protesters circulated videos of police brutality, forcing them to repeatedly witness and process violence (Freelon et al., 2016; Bakare, 2024), which may result in emotional trauma (Allen & Augustin, 2021). This trauma is a form of emotional labor that can lead to burnout, anxiety, and secondary traumatic stress (Snow et al., 2024; Rodriguez, 2022). Additionally, social media amplify hostility through trolling, doxxing, and coordinated harassment campaigns. Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color disproportionately bear this burden (Jane, 2017). A study by Amnesty International (2018) found that women of color in politics and activism experience higher rates of online abuse, requiring them to expend emotional energy on self-protection while continuing advocacy work.
Emotional labor in digital activism is unevenly distributed, reflecting broader societal inequities. Feminist scholars argue that women and marginalized groups are often expected to perform affective labor, emotional work that sustains movements, while receiving little recognition (Banet-Weiser, 2025). For example, in #MeToo, women shared personal trauma narratives, which required vulnerability and emotional risk, while simultaneously supporting others in the movement (Mendes et al., 2019). Similarly, Black activists are frequently called upon to educate others about racism, a taxing process known as racial emotional labor (Gorski, 2019; Tanksley & Hunter, 2024; Chen et al., 2024). This expectation places an additional burden on marginalized activists, who must manage their own emotions while addressing the ignorance or defensiveness of privileged audiences (Sobande, 2020). The commodification of activism on social media further complicates this dynamic, as personal pain is often repackaged as shareable content (Dean, 2019).
Despite these challenges, digital protesters and activists develop strategies to mitigate emotional exhaustion. Some employ networked care (Vachhani, 2024), where mutual aid and emotional support are distributed across online communities. For instance, feminist activists use private messaging groups to debrief after public campaigns (Mendes et al., 2019). As it has been argued, social media plays a crucial role in mitigating health challenges (Thaker & Ganchoudhuri, 2023). Others practice digital detoxing, temporarily disengaging from platforms to preserve mental health (Syvertsen & Enli, 2020). Further, organizational structures also play a role in alleviating emotional labor. For instance, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) incorporated mental health resources into its digital organizing, recognizing the need for collective healing (Norris, 2023). Similarly, some activist groups rotate moderators to distribute the burden of content moderation (Jackson, 2023). Overall, digital activism’s emotional labor is an understudied yet critical aspect of contemporary social movements. While digital tools expand activist reach, they also introduce psychological strains that are often gendered and racialized. Recognizing and addressing these burdens is essential for sustaining long-term activism. This current study expands this area of research in the context of the EndSARS protest in Nigeria. In the next section, I examine the causes of mental health challenges in activism and how digital spaces exacerbate these challenges.
Mental health challenges and digital activism
While social media significantly improved people’s mental wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic (Udenze & Uzochukwu, 2021), Activism, whether conducted offline or through digital platforms, imposes significant emotional and psychological stressors on participants. While digital tools have expanded the reach and efficiency of social movements, they have also contributed to shaping health issues (Adikpo, 2024; Yang, 2024), including the mental health burdens faced by activists (Snow et al., 2024). Mental health fatigue, a state of emotional exhaustion, burnout, and diminished capacity resulting from prolonged engagement in activism, has emerged as a pressing concern in contemporary advocacy (Williams, 2022). Mental health fatigue manifests in several ways in activism. Emotional exhaustion arises from sustained exposure to trauma and systemic injustice, leaving activists feeling drained and overwhelmed (Conner et al., 2023). Compassion fatigue, a form of desensitization, occurs when activists repeatedly encounter suffering, leading to emotional numbness (Boeckenhoff, 2021). Additionally, activist burnout, marked by decreased motivation and a sense of inefficacy, develops when individuals engage in prolonged activism without adequate rest or support (Snow et al., 2024). Unlike general burnout, activist fatigue is often compounded by moral injury, a form of psychological distress that stems from witnessing or being unable to prevent systemic harm (Levy & Gross, 2024; Rudow, 2016). Digital activism exacerbates these issues due to the perpetual nature of online engagement or what Miller et al. (2021) theorise as the perpetual opportunism of the smartphone. As Marshall (2024) reveals, greater engagement with Black Lives Matter-related social media posts in the United States was related to more severe mental health symptoms. Besides, digital activists or protesters sometimes encounter online harassment and bullying (Desborough, 2018).
There are various causes of mental health challenges in digital activism. Activists frequently engage with distressing material, including graphic depictions of violence, hate speech, and survivor testimonies. In digital spaces, this exposure is unrelenting. The widespread circulation of violent imagery, such as videos documenting police brutality, forces activists to repeatedly process trauma (Freelon et al., 2016). Furthermore, supporting survivors in movements like #MeToo often leads to secondary traumatic stress, as activists absorb the emotional pain of others (Mendes et al., 2019). Also, digital activists and online protesters, particularly those from marginalized communities, face coordinated harassment campaigns. Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color are disproportionately targeted with doxxing and trolling (Schmitz et al., 2022; Meisner, 2023). This racialized and gendered abuse imposes additional emotional labor, compounding stress and anxiety (Gorski, 2019). For instance, Black women activists experience disproportionately high levels of online vitriol, often leading to withdrawal from digital advocacy spaces (Tanksley, 2024; Tanksley & Hunter, 2024). Further, social media incentivizes performative solidarity, pressuring activists to maintain constant visibility. This dynamic forces individuals to post frequently to remain relevant, educate others on systemic issues (a form of unpaid racial emotional labor), and manage audience expectations while balancing personal vulnerability (Thimsen, 2022). This affective labor, the emotional work required to sustain movements, often goes unrecognized, deepening fatigue and contributing to burnout (Snow et al., 2024). Related to this last factor is the algorithmic nature of social media, which rewards constant engagement, pressuring activists to remain perpetually online (Lim, 2023). Additionally, the rapid news cycle, where attention shifts abruptly from one crisis to another, creates activist whiplash, leaving individuals emotionally drained (Poell et al., 2023). Evidently, the blurring of boundaries between personal and activist lifestyles makes it difficult for people to disengage from such practices and digital platforms (Howard, 2022). Considering the above studies, and notwithstanding, the growing scholarship (Udenze, 2025; Aboh, 2024) on the EndSARS protest. For instance, Uwalaka’s (2024) exploration of social media as a conduit for solidarity during the movement’s anniversary, and Udenze’s (2024) examination of socio-economic intersections and hydra-headedness of the protest, this study expands the literature by focusing on the understudied angle of protest-specifically, how the EndSARS digital activism practice contributes to mental health challenges.
Methods and procedure
This qualitative research builds on my three-year initial ethnographic study of the EndSARS movement through the framework of collective memory. Upon completing the aforementioned project, I maintained contact with my participants. I followed up with the eleven participants I had studied, inquiring about their lives after the momentum of the protest had subsided. Maintaining friendship and keeping in touch with my participants extends the discourse on friendnography (Smith-Christmas, 2019), which has become an integral part of qualitative research, particularly ethnographic studies (Owton & Allen-Collinson, 2013). In the digital age, this friendship has been amplified by the use of digital and social media for research, for instance, digital ethnography. Damin (2024) describes this form of friendship as digital friendnography. While keeping in touch with my participants, I realised, surprisingly, that a good number of them elaborated on digital mental health in relation to the protest and other related challenges. Consequently, I decided to further investigate the protest from the perspective of digital activism and mental health.
My positionality as a researcher and a friend created a dynamic interplay of access, empathy, and responsibility. While these relationships facilitated deeper insights, particularly as participants disclosed unprompted reflections on digital mental health challenges linked to the protest experience. I remained aware that my closeness to participants could influence the data and its interpretation, potentially introducing data bias. By critically engaging with these power dynamics and maintaining transparency in how I gathered and analysed data, I sought to preserve the integrity of the research while recognising that knowledge production in such contexts is inherently situated, relational, and ethically complex.
Through the eleven participants in my previous study, I was able to snowball (Mohammadi & Zimmermann, 2025) and purposively (Nyimbili & Nyimbili, 2024) recruit an additional eight people who are committed EndSARS advocates. Like the initial eleven participants, these eight people also participated in physical protests in Nigeria during the peak of the movement in 2020, as well as on social media. Consequently, the participants possess the knowledge and information power (Malterud et al., 2016) that engendered rich qualitative data for this research. Furthermore, all nineteen participants in the current study are young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four years. The ages of the participants align with Nigeria’s National Youth Policy, which defines youth as individuals between eighteen and thirty-five years old (Udenze, 2024).
The semi-structured interview method was adopted to collect primary data from the 19 participants. The information power (Malterud et al., 2016) of the participants and the researcher’s interviewing skills (Gandy, 2024) are essential in achieving rich qualitative data. In the case of this research, these elements enabled me to generate rich and useful data. The interviews were primarily centered on digital and mental health experience with respect to the post-EndSARS protest on social media. Due to the paucity of funds for travelling to Nigeria, I conducted the entire interview online. Nine of the interviews were conducted via Zoom. I conducted five interviews on WhatsApp calls, and the remaining five interviews were done on Google Meet. For approximately two decades, the online interview technique has been a crucial approach for collecting data (O’Connor & Madge, 2017). Despite the limitations of the online interview approach (Maia, 2023), the use of online synchronous interviews in this study, which facilitates visual and textual interaction between the participants and me, is an added advantage. Similar to the in-person interviews, this approach allowed me to see and converse in real time with my interlocutors, which also enabled me to document verbal and non-verbal cues and ensure greater spontaneity in responses. Further, my use of the online interview techniques contributes to the discussion on what and where is understood as the field and tools (Hine, 2015; Pink et al., 2026) and the very notion of fieldwork in online digital research.
It is pertinent to note that the participants chose the different online interviewing platforms at their convenience. Through negotiation, me and each participant decided the timeslot that suits us. However, in most of the interviews, I had to give in to the time suggested by the participants. The participants’ informed consents were sought, and they voluntarily agreed to participate in this research. Furthermore, all participants gave their consent to be recorded during the interviews. On average, the interviews lasted forty-five minutes, with the longest lasting an hour and eleven minutes. It is essential to note that, due to the significant knowledge the participants possess about the EndSARS movement, the depth of the interviews (Small & Calarco, 2022) was rich; consequently, the data were qualitatively thick. Although Guest et al. (2006) assert that qualitative interviewing reaches saturation with around 12 interviews. However, Lareau and Rao (2016) argue that the depth of the data is essential in qualitative interviews. Malterud et al. (2016) call Lareau and Rao’s argument the information power of the interviewee, which my participants possess. I transcribed the interviews using Express Scribe, an audio-text software, and the analysis was conducted thematically, following an iterative process similar to Braun and Clarke’s (2024) thematic analysis (TA). First, I read through the interviews to familiarise myself with the data. Next, from the soft copy of the transcript in Microsoft Word, I began identifying patterns of responses among the participants. I identified these patterns by highlighting the needed excerpts in different colours. Wherever unclear and I do not understand, I go back to reread the transcript to fully comprehend it. Afterwards, I started assigning code names to the identified patterns. During this back-and-forth process, I review the nonverbal cues in the interviews and notes I made in my journal to gain a deeper understanding of the analysis. Next, I start merging the codes to form themes. I categorise the initial themes I constructed as non-permanent themes. Two examples of themes from the initial five non-permanent themes I constructed are “psychological fear and burnout” and “emotional drain”. At this juncture, I review the themes in relation to the patterns and codes to ensure that they address the research question. Satisfied with the review of the non-permanent themes, I arrived at three permanent themes. Consequently, I proceed to name the three permanent themes: (a) Emotional exhaustion and trauma exposure, (b) Online harassment and fear of repression (c) Burnouts and disengagement. With the permanent themes in place, I proceed to the phase of writing the analysis report. In writing the report, I draw on excerpts from the dataset. For ethical and privacy reasons, the participants’ names are pseudonymized.
It is pertinent to mention that this study seeks to provide rich and contextualized understandings that others can evaluate for relevance in different settings. With 19 in-depth interviews, this study provides detailed insights into the individual and collective experiences within a clearly defined socio-political movement. The depth and diversity of these accounts support what Smith (2018) terms transferable generalizability, where readers can relate findings to similar contexts or experiences. By offering thick descriptions and allowing participants’ voices to shape the interpretation, this study enables others, be they scholars, policymakers, or activists, to assess the applicability of these findings within broader struggles for youth-led civic engagement, state accountability, and resistance movements beyond Nigeria.
Findings and Discussion
Now, through these themes: (a) Emotional exhaustion and trauma exposure, (b) Online harassment and fear of repression (c) Burnouts and disengagement, I discuss the results generated from the primary data.
Emotional exhaustion and trauma exposure
This theme featured prominently as a critical consequence of prolonged exposure to traumatic content, state-sponsored disinformation, and the moral weight of bearing witness to violence in the EndSARS protest. It discusses the psychological toll exacted by digital activism during EndSARS, drawing upon firsthand accounts to illuminate the intersection of trauma exposure and mental health fatigue. The circulation of violent imagery, particularly footage from the Lekki Tollgate massacre on social media, placed the participants in the untenable position of being both witnesses and protesters of state violence. One participant, Jum, a 30-year-old male protester, described the inescapable nature of this visual trauma: “I watched the live streams of the Lekki Tollgate on Instagram until my phone died. Then I spent hours reposting videos on my social media, hoping the world would see. But after a while, I couldn’t eat. I kept hearing the gunshots in my head.” This account exemplifies the phenomenon of secondary traumatic stress, where indirect exposure to disturbing content through digital media produces symptoms mirroring post-traumatic stress disorder. The participatory nature of social media compounded this effect, as the participant felt compelled to continuously engage with and disseminate traumatic material despite its psychological consequences. Verifying casualties under conditions of state denial imposed another layer of psychological burden. Participants assumed the grim responsibility of identifying victims and corroborating deaths amidst official gaslighting, a process that blurred professional and personal boundaries. “We had to match names with photos, contact families… Some days, I’d just cry because I recognized a face from protest meetups in Lagos”, narrates Meka, a 30-year-old unemployed protester, It felt like burying friends over and over,” recounted one participant. The emotional labour undertaken by the participant, such as identifying victims under conditions of state denial, mirrors the participant’s effort to avoid moral injury, and it exemplifies how ordinary citizens absorb emotional burdens that are supposed to be borne by trained professionals. Further, the intimate nature of this practice, recognizing victims not as anonymous casualties but as comrades, underscores the collectivized dimension of emotional labor shaped by relational proximity and shared struggle. In the African context, where notions of selfhood are often embedded in communal ontologies and interdependent care networks (Blundo & Le Meur, 2009), this form of collective friendship may lessen the emotional burden. It reflects a socio-cultural ethic in which grief, responsibility, and resistance are shared affective practices or affective solidarity (Campos & da Silva, 2024), rather than individual responses, shaping our understanding of the emotional, moral and psychological toll borne by the protesters.
State-sponsored propaganda weaponized psychological distress by forcing activists into exhausting cycles of fact-checking and counter-narratives. The government’s dismissal of the Lekki shooting as a fabrication created cognitive dissonance for those who had witnessed the violence firsthand or through digital documentation. One participant, 25-year-old Nuda, a female, described this: “They said no one died, meanwhile, I was DMing a friend whose friend was shot, and I cried at night; it broke something in me.” This constant negotiation between lived experience and official denial constitutes a form of institutional betrayal that exacerbates moral injury (Levy & Gross, 2024), the distress that results from actions, or the failure to act in ways that violate one’s moral code. The imperative to remain constantly vigilant for new developments or threats created a sustained state of chronic hyperarousal. As Para, a 32-year-old postgraduate student, recounted: “I’d wake up at 3 a.m. to check if something else had happened. My hands shook as I scrolled through Twitter. I knew it was unhealthy, but what if I missed something important?” This narrative exemplifies how the boundaries between digital activism and personal space have eroded, transforming digital tools from sources of empowerment into conduits of anxiety. This aligns with Marshall et al.’s (2024) argument that persistent engagement with social media content related to the Black Lives Matter movement exacerbates mental health symptoms, particularly anxiety and trauma-related responses. Para’s account reflects this pattern, illustrating how the continuous affective and cognitive demands of online activism can induce psychological strain, reinforcing a feedback loop of hypervigilance, emotional fatigue and trauma that undermines well-being in the very spaces intended for solidarity and mobilization.
Survivor’s guilt emerged as a significant emotional burden, particularly among those whose participation in the protests was mostly digital. The paradox of safety, being physically removed from danger while emotionally immersed in the violence, intensified feelings of inadequacy and guilt. “Why was I at home tweeting while people were bleeding? I should’ve been on the streets. Maybe I could’ve done something,” reflected Nusman, a 19-year-old undergraduate at the University of Abuja. This account illustrates how digital mediation of activism can distort perceptions of participation, accountability, and moral responsibility. The inability to act physically, despite emotional proximity to harm, disrupts conventional narratives of agency and solidarity. This experience resonates with the concept of moral injury (Levy & Gross, 2024; Rudow, 2016), where people suffer psychological and existential distress not necessarily from what they did, but from what they feel they failed to do in moments of perceived moral obligation. For a digital protester like Nusman, online engagement offers visibility but rarely closure, leaving unresolved the inner conflict between witnessing injustice and the felt inadequacy of response. Consequently, digital activism exposes people to secondary trauma and amplifies moral dissonance, challenging prevailing understandings of presence, risk, and ethical duty in contemporary resistance movements.
Further, participants found themselves serving as trauma counselors for distressed followers while simultaneously processing their own grief. Amarachi, who managed an EndSARS protest social media hotline, described the toll: “I heard and read people complaining bitterly about friends that have been tortured and arrested by the police. I was tired, but I had to mute my emotions to keep attending to them, but the stories played in my head like a loop.” This emotional dissonance, the gap between felt emotions and required professional demeanor is well-documented in caregiving professions (Halevi Hochwald et al., 2022; Bandieri et al., 2023), but remains understudied in activist contexts. Without institutional support, many activists reached emotional bankruptcy. Even more disturbing, though, is the fact that the psychological and emotion impacts of working with trauma from online interactions linger for much longer than the protests themselves. Daily events kept reminding the participants of the trauma. One participant, Adi, a 33-year-old Engineer, reminisced years afterwards, “A firecracker sounds like a gunshot to me, and I get frightened every time I see a police van. It’s as if my mind never left Lekki,”. This lasting hypersensitivity gets at the manner in which recorded violence on digital media, available for potentially unbounded reproduction and re-circulation, prolongs and exacerbates traumatic response well beyond traditional temporal boundaries.
Online harassment and fear of repression
While digital platforms provided tools for mobilization and documentation, they simultaneously became vectors for government-sponsored online harassment and repression, leaving lasting psychological scars on the mental health of the participants. At the heart of this was a sophisticated surveillance apparatus that transformed digital platforms into spaces of perpetual anxiety. Participants described developing what one participant termed “Social media paranoia”, a constant, low-grade fear that manifested in physical symptoms. “My hands would shake when composing tweets after dark,” recalled one participant. Another participant avers, “I’d write three versions of a post before settling on one I thought wouldn’t get me arrested.” This self-censorship reflects what Foucault (1980) might describe as the internalization of the panoptic gaze, where the mere possibility of surveillance alters behavior before any actual repression occurs. The psychological impact extends beyond the protests themselves, with many participants reporting persistent hypervigilance in their digital lives years later.
The government’s weaponization of personal data introduced another layer of trauma. Doxxing campaigns against prominent activists created what clinical psychologists would recognize as a form of complex PTSD, where the threat remains ongoing and inescapable. One female participant, Desa, described the surreal experience of seeing her personal post shared in a pro-government WhatsApp group alongside threats of violence. “They didn’t just want to scare me,” she noted, “they wanted me to feel like every part of my life belonged to them.” This violation of intimate digital spaces produces a particular kind of gendered trauma that merits further feminist analysis. Furthermore, it corroborates Desborough’s (2018) argument that protesters are sometimes targeted and harassed online. Perhaps most insidious was the state’s deployment of computational propaganda to discredit and undermine the movement. Bot networks and fake accounts did not just spread disinformation - they systematically undermined activists’ trust in their own perceptions and memories. “When the government tweets started claiming protesters had weapons,” one participant and a medical volunteer recalled, “I actually found myself doubting what I had seen with my own eyes in the trauma ward.” This epistemic instability mirrors the effects of psychological torture techniques documented in other authoritarian contexts (Alemán, 2023), where reality itself becomes contested ground.
The normalization of arbitrary arrests produced its own distinct psychological profile. Unlike traditional political repression with its clear lines of persecution, Nigeria’s digital-era crackdowns followed an algorithmic logic that seemed arbitrary to its victims. According to a participant, 20-year-old, Durum, “They didn’t come for one person, just enough of us to make everyone wonder if they’d be next.” This unpredictable pattern of repression creates ambiguous loss (Perry, 2025), a state of perpetual uncertainty that prevents psychological closure and complicates trauma recovery. The cumulative effect of these digital repression tactics has been a fundamental transformation of Nigeria’s activist ecosystem. Where previous generations of protesters in Nigeria could point to clear moments of persecution and resistance (Olukotun, 2002), the EndSARS protesters describe a more diffuse, lingering trauma. Ukwu, a 27-year-old journalist, puts this perspective: “It’s not like the military era where you knew the danger ended when you left the protest site. “Now the repression follows you home in your pocket, sleeps next to you in bed, wakes you up with notifications.” This boundaryless quality of digital-era state violence demands new frameworks for understanding activist trauma in the 21st century. What emerges from these narratives is a story of government overreach and cautionary tales about the psychological vulnerabilities inherent in digital resistance. The very features that make social media powerful organizing tools - their persistence, replicability, and searchability - become liabilities when turned against activists.
Burnouts and disengagement
Unlike material protests, which often contain temporal and spatial boundaries, allowing participants to exit or recuperate physically, digital activism can be relentless due to what Miller et al. (2021) term the perpetual opportunism of the smartphone. This constant connectivity creates exposure to distressing content, limiting the protester’s capacity to disengage. As Zada, a 23-year-old male protester, recounted: “One morning, during the third anniversary of the protest, I deleted some apps. I couldn’t take another ‘RIP’ post. It’s been over three years, and I still can’t engage like before.” Zada’s withdrawal illustrates emotional exhaustion, a phenomenon that Snow et al. (2024) and Gorski (2019) identify as activist burnout, a state of physical, emotional, and psychological depletion that occurs when the demands of social justice work chronically outweigh the resources available to cope. Further, Tobi, a 28-year-old male participant, recalls, “I was running Twitter threads, and fact-checking disinformation, while also protesting,” Tobi further narrates, “After six weeks, I collapsed at my work desk. My body just shut down.” This experience mirrors what psychologists (Oehlke et al., 2025) identify as chronic stress activation, where prolonged exposure to stress hormones leads to physical and mental breakdown. The always-on nature of digital activism, with its endless notifications and real-time crises, made such burnout almost inevitable. In digital spaces, this is exacerbated by the non-linear temporality of online memory, where traumatic content resurfaces unpredictably, compounding affective fatigue. The persistent nature of digital platforms, combined with their algorithmic tendency to amplify emotionally charged content, leads to affective overload. This impairs individual well-being and also weakens sustained collective engagement, as people lose enthusiasm, threatening the longevity and momentum of the movement. Such burnout reflects a broader structural issue in digital resistance, where the infrastructures meant to mobilize solidarity can also become channels of sustained psychic harm if not consciously navigated.
While digital platforms enabled rapid mobilization, they also diffused responsibility, leaving individuals to set their own unsustainable limits. According to Zub, a 31-year-old male, “There was no structure telling me to stop.” Chike, a graphic designer who created protest materials, narrates: “I worked on posters, I was worn out, and my hands cramped.” This self-exploitation reflects what sociologists (Ravenelle & Kowalski, 2023) call the passion principle in digital labor, where moral commitment overrides self-preservation instincts. Further, state repression accelerated the participants’ burnout. After doxxing and arrest attempts, participants felt tired. “I stopped protesting and believing anything,” confessed Folake, a former activist and protester. Another participant avers, “The police kept harassing people, and my hashtags did little.” This crisis of efficacy, when the protesters perceive their efforts as futile, proved more devastating than physical burnout. Another participant, Del, a 23-year-old male protester, avers, “I can’t engage with activism content online anymore; it triggers something visceral.” Psychologists (Johnson, 2023) note that Del’s case resembles combat trauma, suggesting digital activism may carry unique neurological impacts when combined with state violence. Another participant, 23-year-old Sim, says: “We changed the national conversation, but I lost myself in the process.” This haunting epitaph captures the central paradox, that today’s powerful tools for socio-political liberation may also be engines of activist depletion. Consequently, without systemic solutions, the price of digital resistance threatens to become unsustainable.
Conclusion
This study has attempted to explore how the EndSARS movement reveals the paradox of digital activism: while it democratizes participation, mobilization and documentation, it also democratizes trauma exposure. Mental health challenges are an occupational hazard of contemporary activism, exacerbated by the demands of digital engagement. While digital technology has revolutionized mobilization, it has also introduced new psychological risks, including trauma, harassment, and performative pressures. The testimonies of the participants in this research serve as both a warning and a roadmap, highlighting an urgent need to address the invisible casualties of digital resistance and the mental and emotional well-being of those who engage in activism on screens as well as on the streets. The participants ‘ experiences put this question in our minds: When the smartphone turns off and the social media algorithms move on, who bears responsibility for healing those left traumatized by the frontlines of digital dissent? Consequently, the challenge for future movements in Nigeria would be to develop resistance strategies that account for these psychological dimensions of digital authoritarianism, creating sustainable models of activism that take the mental health of protesters seriously, especially post-protest. Traditional models of self-care may prove inadequate against the pervasive, boundaryless nature of digital trauma. Instead, collective approaches that acknowledge the unique stressors of digital witnessing would do. Institutionalized mental health support, ethical guidelines for traumatic content sharing, and sustainable participation frameworks should be developed by platforms to preserve the mental health of protesters. Further, the theoretical contribution of this study lies in its extension of theories of emotional labour and digital activism by foregrounding the psychological costs of participation in digital resistance, particularly within the context of the Global South. By suggesting that digital activism fosters broader participatory mobilization while also intensifying health challenges, the study challenges dominant narratives that often celebrate digital engagement without considering its emotional and mental health implications. It advances the concept of emotional labour in activism by situating it within the digital sphere, where activists must navigate constant exposure to violence, harassment, and performative pressures. From a Global South perspective, the study emphasizes the need for context-specific frameworks that address the mental health risks faced by protesters and activists. Consequently, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of digital resistance, which is both empowering and emotionally hazardous. Notwithstanding the contribution of this study, it is essential that future studies also attempt to use a quantitative or triangulation approach, and employ broader sampling across geographic, gender, and class lines, to understand how activists and protesters grapple with the challenge of mental health, and to further the transferability of this study’s findings. Future studies could also explore policy-based solutions to safeguard the well-being of protesters in an increasingly digital movement landscape.
Notes
Data Availability Statement
The data is available upon reasonable request and subsequent approval from the participants of the study.
Funding Information
No funding from any agency was received for this project.