Nigeria Bans Twitter After President’s Tweet Is Deleted

Twitter labored on some cellphone carriers and never others on Saturday, based on tests conducted by Reuters in Lagos and Abuja.

Fb and WhatsApp are the social networks utilized by most Nigerians, however the nation’s intellectuals, activists and journalists are inclined to gravitate towards Twitter — and plenty of had been in a position to preserve tweeting after the ban.

“Thank God for VPN” was trending on Twitter in Nigeria on Saturday, and plenty of Nigerians took to the platform to remark that Africa’s greatest democracy was exhibiting worrying indicators of dictatorship in suppressing the fitting to free speech.

“Suspending Twitter in Nigeria is only one extra approach of stating that individuals’s rights don’t matter,” Osai Ojigho, Amnesty Worldwide’s nation director in Nigeria, mentioned in a tweet. “It is a harmful precedent.”

“We should resist each try at a dictatorship,” wrote Editi Effiong, a filmmaker who coated EndSARS.

“The final transfer of a failing Authorities is at all times to attempt to silence everybody who factors out that they’re failing,” posted Mark Essien, a Nigerian entrepreneur and software program developer.

Even some authorities officers continued tweeting.

“You didn’t get the memo!” one Nigerian Twitter person tweeted at Sharon Ikeazor, minister of state for the atmosphere, after she posted a tweet about an event on plastic air pollution on Saturday morning.

“Which VPN are you utilizing?” requested one other.