Abstract

Nigeria's 2023 general elections unfolded within an increasingly complex digital information environment characterised by political humour, manipulated media, identity-based narratives, and rapidly circulating online content. While debates on deepfakes have largely focused on technologically sophisticated synthetic videos, the Nigerian experience suggests that democratic harm frequently emerges through more culturally intelligible forms of political manipulation. Images, voice notes, edited screenshots, captions, and internet memes often proved more electorally consequential because they travelled easily across platforms and resonated with existing political anxieties and partisan identities. This article conceptualises deepfake memes as AI-forged cultural weapons whose political significance lies not only in their synthetic properties but also in their capacity to transform cultural symbols into instruments of political persuasion, ridicule, and reputational injury. Drawing on qualitative multimodal discourse analysis and the secondary re-analysis of verified scholarly and institutional materials relating to Nigeria's 2023 elections, the study examines how manipulated political artefacts acquire democratic significance through synthetic manipulation, memetic packaging, cultural weaponisation, and platform amplification. The findings suggest that the most influential forms of manipulated political content were not necessarily those that achieved perfect synthetic realism but those that successfully combined humour, visual salience, cultural familiarity, and cross-platform circulation. The article advances a four-layer model of AI-forged electoral meme weaponisation and argues that responding effectively to emerging forms of political manipulation requires moving beyond technological detection towards greater attention to multimodal literacy, platform accountability, and culturally informed approaches to democratic resilience