{"id":17988,"date":"2021-06-07T04:14:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T04:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barazalab.com\/?p=17988"},"modified":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","slug":"nigerias-twitter-suspension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuwele.com\/baraza_update\/nigerias-twitter-suspension\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigeria\u2019s Twitter Suspension"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings, friends:<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about Nigeria\u2019s Twitter suspension, which the country\u2019s government put into effect two days after the social media platform <\/span>deleted <\/span><\/a>a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari. According to reports, access to Twitter through Nigeria’s main mobile providers has been blocked, and those accessing Twitter via Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been threatened with <\/span>arrest<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following a spate of attacks in south-eastern Nigeria, President Buhari\u2019s tweet had threatened to act on \u201cthose misbehaving today\u201d in \u201cthe language they will understand\u201d, referring to the 1967-70 Biafran War. Twitter considered the post a violation of its rules, as threatening civil war or incitement to violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nigeria is just the latest country in Africa to ban a social media app – Uganda and Tanzania both restricted access to the internet and social media apps during elections in January 2021 and October 2020 respectively. In June last year, Ethiopia imposed an internet shutdown which lasted for close to a month; Zimbabwe, Togo, Burundi, Chad, Mali and Guinea also restricted access to the internet or social media apps at some point in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact,<\/span> the BBC reports<\/span><\/a> that in 2019, there were 25 documented instances of partial or total internet shutdowns, compared with 20 in 2018 and 12 in 2017, according to Access Now, an independent monitoring group.<\/span><\/p>\n

Could this happen in Kenya? Well, media analyst Grace Bomu <\/span>argued <\/span><\/a>that the reason the internet wasn\u2019t shut down in Kenya during the last election in 2017 was perhaps because the state needed the same internet for its own communication purposes: i.e. media manipulation, sensationalised stories, negative campaigning and disinformation. In other words, perhaps fake news (propagated by the state) saved Kenya from an internet shutdown (!).<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps an unlikely silver lining of living in a country as chaotic as this one – that political contestation is so fraught and unstable as to require even the state to keep the Internet open, in order to maintain a tenuous edge. We must always remember, as Gene Sharp explained in <\/span>this influential little book,<\/span><\/a> that any government isn\u2019t as stable or powerful as it projects. All regimes have weaknesses and internal contradictions that can be exploited to advance freedom. We must always remember this.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, here\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n