Audience Perception of the Reportage of 2023 Presidential Elections in Nigeria: An Analysis of Facebook Posts of Selected Newspaper Organisations

News reports on election enjoy wide readership among audience groups. This perhaps is because of the important role elections play in leadership architecture of democratic societies. The study employed content analysis and the study’s population comprises all comments made under Punch, Premium Times, and Leadership newspapers regarding the outcomes of the 2023 presidential election. The analyses comprised comments from 18 posts, 6 posts from each of the three newspapers. The selected posts spanned from 20 October 2022 to 30 May 2023, covering reports on pre-election activities and post-election reactions and litigations. We adopted the manual content analysis of the Facebook comments (N = 5059) extracted from the selected posts from Punch (n = 3262), Premium Times (n = 1000), and Leadership (n = 797), after deleting irrelevant comments. Facebook was considered for this study because of its popularity among Nigerian news seekers. One hundred comments were randomly selected, and each of our four evaluators solely sorted the comments into our content categories. Results showed the inter-rater agreement was high (a = 74%) and values suggested good reliability. Findings indicate that most of the comments expressed under Facebook posts of newspaper organisations regarding the 2023 presidential elections were partisan. This was reflected in how these comments aligned with the major political parties participating in the election. The study concludes that Facebook users have not employed the platform to suggest policies to the government and its agencies. Rather they opt for vituperations, lamentations, and vitriol attacks on politicians, government agencies, media, and fellow co-users of the platform with different stances on issues of discourse.