![]() The tendency of the Nigerian government to suppress public opinion is exemplified in Mrs. However, the authority has always suppressed and controlled negative expressions of Nigerians about government representatives ( Adibe et al., 2017 Ellis, 2016). Studies about multiple social contexts such as Colombia ( Correa and Camargo, 2017), Belgium ( Kurten and Beullens, 2021), Japan ( Mason, 2019), Finland ( Koiranen et al., 2019), India ( Ahmed et al., 2018), the United States ( Lim and Lee-Won, 2017), Spain ( Santoveña-Casal et al., 2021), Thailand ( Leelawat et al., 2021), and the United Kingdom ( Asher et al., 2019) have shown how Twitter served as a lens through which the seemingly disorganized social issues are organized as connected parts of a whole. The article undertakes a qualitative analysis of tweets of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), an elite law enforcement agency, to understand public attitudes, sentiments, and expressions concerning the prosecutions of Nigerian cybercriminals. So, Nigerian society is a resource for understanding social forces in the virtual world concerning its citizens ( Lazarus and Okolorie, 2019). However, computers hold different meanings and generate various social issues influenced by the socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts in which the computers and their users are located ( Hall et al., 2020 Lazarus & Okolorie, 2019 Lewis, 2020). Contextually, Nigerian cyber-fraudsters in Ibadan, Canadian cyberbullies in Toronto, Russian ransomware criminals in Moscow, Chinese political hackers in Harbin, and Jamaican lottery scammers in Montego Bay often have materially identical computers. This article examines how Twitter users employ moral disengagement as a strategy to rationalize the activities of online criminals. ![]() Public opinion on Twitter offers opportunities to explore contestations between diverse standpoints ( Karamouzas et al., 2022 Tournay et al., 2020). We conclude that the process by which some actions are interpreted as a crime compared to others is a moral enterprise. Indeed, tweet responses suggest that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generally looks downwards for culprits (i.e., online fraudsters) while ignoring fraudulent politicians. Similarly, the results show how respondents positioned this linguistic strategy to compare “the powerless group” (online fraudsters) and “the powerful group” (politicians) in society. The results reveal how respondents defend the actions of online fraudsters (“the deviant group”) by strategically comparing them to the wrongful acts of corrupt politicians (“the respectable group”). We analyzed and coded over 100,000 ‘engaged’ tweets based on a component of mechanisms of moral disengagement (i.e., advantageous comparison), a linguistic device. ![]() Which linguistic strategies do Twitter users use to express their opinions on cybercriminals and politicians? The study undertakes a qualitative analysis of ‘engaged’ tweets of an elite law enforcement agency in West Africa. This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of Nigerians: cybercriminals and politicians.
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