Twitter ban in Nigeria sparks outrage
The suspension of Twitter in Nigeria and the order for media outlets to delete their accounts on the social network have outraged Africa's most populous country, whose young and highly connected population has embraced the platform as a tool of social protest.. More than 120 million Nigerians have access to the internet and nearly 20% of them, or 40 million people, say they have a Twitter account, according to Lagos-based statistical research bureau NOI Polls.. This very high number (France, for example, has only 8 million subscribers) is explained in particular “by its large and young population, but also by the weight of its diaspora, especially in the United States or by the world notoriety of the stars Nigerians” of Afropop film or music, analyzes Manon Fouriscot, co-founder of Afriques Connectées.
But studies also reveal that Twitter, unlike other social networks, is used in Nigeria to “give a voice to the voiceless,” or even “to challenge the government about what's wrong in the country,” according to NOI. Polls.”Twitter is, in Nigeria and increasingly on the continent, a means for civil society to express itself, mobilize, alert international public opinion”, stresses Manon Fouriscot, an expert in the use of social networks in Africa. Last October, the #EndSARS movement against violence by the SARS police unit, which morphed into a youth platform against power, erupted on Twitter before taking to the streets.#EndSARS, backed by Afropop icons with millions of subscribers and by important international influencers, was the most shared hashtag in the world for two days. It was followed by the largest protests in modern Nigerian history, raising fears of government destabilization before being bloodily put down.
“Return to dictatorship”
“In recent years, the Nigerian government has tightened control of digital media,” says Kian Vesteinsson, a researcher at Freedom House, a human rights watchdog.. “Nigerian journalists and press groups claim to have been targeted by digital surveillance and victims of cyberattacks linked to security forces,” says this specialist in technology and democracy. But by completely suspending Twitter indefinitely, the authorities, who say the platform wanted to destabilize the country by letting Biafran separatists speak and suppressing President Buhari's tweets, have gone further.. On Monday, the national audiovisual regulatory body (NBC) asked all broadcasters to delete their Twitter accounts, and warned that any use of this social network would be considered “unpatriotic.”
The use of a VPN (virtual private network) that allows access to Twitter bypassing the blockade in Nigeria will also be considered a crime, warned the information minister, although no law was voted in this regard in Parliament. Human rights organizations affirm that this violates the principles of fundamental freedoms established in the 1999 Constitution, the official date of the end of the military regimes.. “The Twitter buffer is above all a means of buffering the communication media”, estimates the web manager of an important television channel. “We have to react, because if we don't react they can go further.”
A media group, DAAR Communications, announced that it had filed a complaint for damage to its economic interests.. Some outlets, such as Arise TV, continued to use Twitter to share the news of the day, from their offices in England or the United States to circumvent the directive.. “Nigeria has returned to dictatorship,” Kola Tubosun, a Nigerian writer, said in an editorial in the international journal Foreign Policy.. “You have the feeling of being in 1984, ruled by a military regime,” he writes, referring to the year Muhammadu Buhari, then a general, first led the country, after a coup.. But youth 2.0 is already reorganizing on social networks under the hashtag #KeepItOn (“continue”) and trying to organize a movement for June 12. On Monday night, on the ClubHouse platform, a new trending social discussion network in Nigeria, thousands of netizens gathered to answer questions like “How to block the dictatorship?” or “23 years ago (the former head of the 1990 military dictatorship, (Sani) Abacha died. What have we learned since then?”.