Twitter Ban in Nigeria | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Ban in Nigeria

bbc.com

63 pointskaladin_183 comments

For specific context: a tweet that was deemed threatening and inciteful to a segment of the country - the south east (where I'm from), was sent from the President's account.

After sustained uproar and outrage, Twitter deleted the Tweet.

Blocking Twitter is the response.

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For background context: This government is very unpopular. Twitter has been the medium where the atrocities of the government has been publicized. Last year there was a very popular protest #ENDSARS (campaigning against police brutalization and killings) to which Jack Dorsey made a donation.

Earlier this year, Twitter opened their West African office in Ghana. It was seen as a massive snub and embarrassment to Nigeria. So the government has had a hurt ego brewing for a while.

PS: The great irony is that this government used the influence of social media to get into power. So this is them throwing down the ladder after using it.

AMA.

Do you expect a peaceful resolution? It’s great to tell a bully to calm down, but you want either them to calm down (which doesn’t seem likely here) or more reasonable people to take over.

To be honest, we don't know where this is going. We all want a peaceful outcome.

The next elections are in 2023 so there is no near resolution by the ballot.

There is over 50% unemployment, mega inflation, currency devaluation etc and yet a consistent clampdown on anything deemed progressive by the government.

The truth is, if anything happens to the peace of Nigeria and if only 5%, of its occupants get displaced (10million people) the world will feel it's impact in a very negative way.

Unfortunately, thanks to COVID, Brexit et al, no one is paying attention so the government assumes it has it has a freehand.

Unfortunately for them, our population is very young, quite adept at adapting, innovative etc. So I do not see us backing down. Despite the worst of policies, there has been unprecedented growth in our tech startup scene (YC can testify)

So for now, we watch.

Also worth noting that the Nigerian government has explicitly been using China/the CCP as an inspiration for its information & communications policy for a while now.

Alas, they're not interested in copying the economic growth or infrastructure development to go with the authoritarianism. Not even a crumb of carrot to go with the stick.

For a bit more context (from the article)

Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey personally donated money to groups organizing protests in Nigeria. Twitter also created a special emoji just for the protests.

> Twitter also created a special emoji just for the protests

Ooft. Although I know nothing of Nigerian politics, that seemed like a dumb move.

Why does it seem like a dumb move?

Because Twitter is getting involved in politics. The US didn't like it when Russia got involved in its elections, so why is it ok for Twitter?

Explain how exactly Twitter (the company) was getting involved in Nigerian elections, please?

Censorship. World leaders won't be gagged by Jack Dorsey. India is next.

The government whose action you're commending quite literally has a history of arresting & detaining its critics, extorting & sometimes murdering its citizens in the street, supporting blasphemy laws, and blocking content and even financial transactions that it deems dissident (and those blocks are implemented with such a wide brush that plenty of completely unrelated sites often get caught in the net).

But of course, the real censorship is when a foreign social media platform that's used by a few percent of the population at maximum takes down a post.

It's always funny to see people cosplay at caring about censorship by...jumping to support the first actual authoritarian in sight.

And all that's beside the fact that this had nothing whatsoever to do with elections.

> The government whose action you're commending quite literally has a history of arresting & detaining its critics, extorting & sometimes murdering its citizens in the street, supporting blasphemy laws, and blocking content and even financial transactions that it deems dissident (and those blocks are implemented with such a wide brush that plenty of completely unrelated sites often get caught in the net).

So has the US. Americans, and their mega corporations, have no moral high ground to lecture others.

> But of course, the real censorship is when a foreign social media platform that's used by a few percent of the population at maximum takes down a post.

Who elected Jack Dorsey and his band of far-left censors king? Twitter is a guest in every foreign country, as we're seeing play out.

> It's always funny to see people cosplay at caring about censorship by...jumping to support the first actual authoritarian in sight.

No. Rather the pot should refrain from calling the kettle black

> And all that's beside the fact that this had nothing whatsoever to do with elections.

Censoring politicians has everything to do with elections.

> So has the US. Americans, and their mega corporations, have no moral high ground to lecture others.

That's nice, but considering that I am a Nigerian I don't really see what that has to do with me.

> No. Rather the pot should refrain from calling the kettle black

"On the one hand we have a former military dictator currently heading a regime that has repeatedly shown that it has no qualms using its security forces to kill civilians in order to keep the populace in line (besides starving them of resources). On the other we have a social media platform deleting a post because people reported it. These two things are of course the same."

> Censoring politicians has everything to do with elections.

Twitter removed a tweet that can very credibly be read as threatening genocidal action after Nigerians reported it to the platform as threatening violence.

I am still very patiently waiting for you to explicitly explain how, precisely, this is interfering with the country's elections.

Twitter naively overplayed their hand. These are the consequences.

From the point of view of a European living in America the #ENDSARS protests looked very similarly motivated as the #BLM protests in America and Europe. #BLM got their own emoji, so why wouldn’t #ENDSARS?

Speaking as a Nigerian, somehow I'm not quite sure we're thought of as real communities with real people living real lives and not just a vague political blob on a map.

You also see this in many people's inability to mentally separate a government from its citizens - they themselves know that they don't fully agree with everything their own governments do (even the ones they like), but other places get treated as monoliths whose governments' actions and opinions are obviously completely representative and in the best interests of the whole.

We are speaking of the platform that find it ok to ban a legally elected president because they disagreed with him politically. Twitter needs to be controlled more effectively to remain politically neutral, or they should register themselves as a political organization instead of pretending to be a business.

For a bit more context, the protests that Jack Dorsey donated to were against a police unit that regularly terrorised, extorted (ahem, robbed) and sometimes murdered young people based almost entirely on profiling such as "having locs" and "using an iPhone"[0].

0. For example this is as recently as two days ago: https://twitter.com/codebeast/status/1400423232189120521

India will be next to ban Twitter. And their govt. is not unpopular, nor will that decision be insignificant to the price of Twitter stock.

>And their govt. is not unpopular

Will they actually remain "not unpopular" if they ban Twitter?

Can Twitter be a concern at all for vast majority of Indian voters?

Nope. May be Facebook ban can have some impact.

Twitter ban is a non factor except for a minority of India's western educated elite.

Most Indian users will happily migrate to whichever platform emerges the winner after Twitter gets the boot.

The govt is unpopular already among the demographic that uses Twitter. So it won't make much difference.

Interesting.

To me, India seemed like the most reasonable in that region.

Well, this region includes China, Afghanistan and Pakistan .. thus in comparison India does look most reasonable.

Western dotcoms really need gang up together, and look at creating a solution for "unbannability."

The Facebook, Amazon, Google hosts a double digit portion of the Internet, and can take an even bigger part of it hostage.

They can easily force countries to either block Internet completely, or bend over.

How?

Honest question. These companies are large, but they don't have too much power in these countries. Especially China has a lot of internal alternatives (Aliexpress cloud and Baidu for example), so external pressure will really only help them. Case in point: Huawei's Playstore ban - this would probably have killed the phone division of a western country. Then there's the problem of biting the (kid's) hand that builds your hardware and/or servers and the one that pays your bill (AWS customers are not going to be happy when their Chinese customers are blocked).

Irrespective of the discussion on whether the tech giants taking such massive political influence is a good thing, I simply don't see how they could.

IP addresses, American dotcoms taken together control a double digit percentage of all IPV4 addresses.

+ Android

+ Windows

Then they will just ban the IPs?

And half of the Internet

IP adresses don't matter much - China has a lot of them and in the worst case, they could simply reroute them at the firewall and reuse them internally.

Android is fully open source, oonly the play store is controlled by Google. China already has a lot of alternatives (and have a look at Huawei on how well that block worked).

Windows would put hurt a bit, yes, but cracked versions of it are not a rarity. Additionally, there's always Linux. So unless MS remote-wipes their machines (and kill themselves by doing so), it would probably not hurt either.

And if the country is smaller, like Nigeria, China will be happy to offer their help for a bit of political influence.

> And if the country is smaller, like Nigeria, China will be happy to offer their help for a bit of political influence.

And why not to let them? Half the kingdom for a privilege to kill somebody's Facebook page? A very good trade.

Dictators are even more well aware than democracies what opening the door to Beijing means. They will rather not to.

They could just allow a handful of their devforce to open source the means (software) for being able to connect to the (real and free) internet from anywhere in earth, no matter what govt rules you've to abide too or whatever!

Doesn't this happen somehow? it's just hard technically, I'm sure we can improve the UX

Why would Indians want their politics to be dictated by the west? Indians sacrificed blood sweat and tears to get the British out, why should they have to fight to get the Americans out?

Right now, the educated, and progressive part of Indian society sacrifice blood sweat and tears to get Modi out.

The solution is to not run everything from one organization.

I'd like to see Nigeria ban mastodon. Sure they could ban instances and if they got very aggressive with policing they could make it hard to host within the country but it certainly wouldn't be as easy as banning twitter was.

FANG will never do this because the centralization gives them an incredible amount of power.

Why on Earth would this be a good thing? I'm all for freedom of information, but I'm even more for foreign companies not ignoring the laws set by the government I elected.

Things get murkier when governments don't come to power in kosher ways, but I'm absolutely certain that the solution is not to have a bunch of profit-motivated companies from a completely different country and culture decide what's best for a nation. What happens when they get together and decide to make an unbannable advertising network instead?

What do you want more?

Self-determination. Always.

> Self-determination. Always.

This is the self determination of Nigerian people: https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/buhari-...

You do not like it? Do you like Mr. Bukhari, and his troopers who can shoot you to death, and rob you completely randomly?

I think ousting a man who lets his men murder, and rob random people is a very good thing.

I'm not going to speak for Nigerians. If you want Nigerian opinions, ask Nigerians.

I am going to say that I don't see how laws imposed by an unelected foreign company are better than laws imposed by an unelected local government. And when we're talking about companies creating unbannable sites, we're absolutely talking about companies dictating law.

Edit: Please stop editing your comment after I've responded.

> And when we're talking about companies creating unbannable sites, we're absolutely talking about companies dictating law.

Government banning speech is a very bad thing. This usually leads to death, and violence, like a lot of it, and most extreme one.

Foreign nations and companies dictating laws to a country has historically led to much the same things.

Many people in the countries Britain colonised lived under autocracies without even a veneer of freedom. How many of those countries today appreciate Britain's actions?

I'd rather people are aware of solutions on a protocol level. Say for example if more people knew how to connect and use Tor.

At the moment many Nigerians have downloaded and installed (free) VPNs but I'm afraid of the massive scam that'd follow it. Many of the unknown VPN companies would just harvest people's financial information and all what not...

That is literally the definition of someone calling for companies to act as gangsters and engage in racketeering.

It’s not that simple. Twitter has business, operations, and employees in India. Twitter can choose to stop doing business in India. This decision will hurt both Twitter and Indian economy. It’s not in the interest of both parties to keep escalating.

> It’s not in the interest of both parties to keep escalating.

I think it clearly is.

Modi is set to Robinhood them. If options are set to doing that, and winning the election, or not doing that, and loosing, he will certainly do so.

If he will be set to lose it if he not bans them, or bans them, but still lose, he will be way more pliable. Way more.

Western dotcoms are pretty impotent when it comes to the Chinese ban. Local alternatives will always crop up

> Western dotcoms are pretty impotent when it comes to the Chinese ban.

Because they never even tried.

India will be next to ban Twitter if Twitter decides to NOT abide by social media laws made by the country government which other social media companies have promised to / are working towards.

Sorry, Key context was missing.

Personal opinion: I do not think they'll outright ban it, if they do, there will be some change in public opinion for sure.

I understand the sentiment of many people supporting the decision of the Nigerian Government. But, you have to understand that for us twitter is not a luxury like it may seem in the West. It is the only popular safe space to express your opinion and call for international help.

So, even though some may like it, Nigerians and Africans fear this sort of move. It usually precedes pernicious acts of injustice that should be hidden.

If only you know the role of Twitter during the monumental protest held last year by young people against Police Brutality here.

I'm not canonizing Twitter, it's not without its faults, but, it's also of great use for us here.

It technically the Assembly for the Youth

Whenever twitter bans someone, there's a chorus of comments saying that twitter is just a website, just use some uncensorable p2p protocol, etc.. It seems like all of this would also apply to twitter itself getting banned, and yet I don't see any such comments here.

A company deciding not to transact with someone is not analogous to a government preventing its citizens from accessing portions of the web.

The idea that companies should be able to control governments is a very american idea, and is pretty much not accepted anywhere else.

When a website actively supports destabilizing forces against a nation, the least that nation (and it's people) can do is to block said website.

My comment states a specific analogy, which is that a lot of the excuses people give for the former also apply to the latter. You can't refute this just by stating that it's "not analogous".

I suppose they’re speciously similar, but the argument at its core is “people should be able to freely associate” which cuts against this decision by the Nigerian government.

It seems obvious to me that no matter what you personally think of e.g. a restaurant refusing to serve food to someone or even a group of people, the federal government issuing and implementing a decree (all within a matter of hours!) that bans all citizens/residents of the country from even entering said restaurant is a ridiculous overreaction and a gross abuse of state power.

I mean obviously when people say that it is a rhetorical devise to win an argument. I mean the people saying that are saying it exactly because it is bullshit. It is hard to argue against exactly because it is such bullshit.

Smart. Honestly, every country should ban Twitter and Facebook. They are a net negative; this century's version of tobacco companies. Arguably worse, as they are a cancer on the entire discourse and well being of society writ large.

Do you have any alternative platform where people that genuinely feel oppressed can call for help or even assemble themselves.

Not everything about Twitter is good, but, for countries at the verge of losing their right to free speech, access to twitter proves essential until there's a better alternative.

> Do you have any alternative platform where people that genuinely feel oppressed can call for help or even assemble themselves.

Yes, it's called the Web. It's a somewhat decentralized platform where people can publish websites. With some effort, it's not too hard to escape local government censorship on it.

You are aware that the government you are applauding censors access to other portions of the Web too, yes? Or do you think *.twitter.com is magically the first?

From long and unfortunate experience I don't really expect better but I am honestly begging non-Nigerians (specifically westerners to be very honest) to have a shred of empathy for people outside your comfort zones when commenting on foreign affairs.

I dearly wish I could have lived the sort of life that would make a social media platform removing people's posts or banning their accounts the great injustice of the day. I don't begrudge anyone that privilege but for goodness' sake try not to project your pet peeves on situations you barely know anything about. Nothing on this earth should bring you to the point of applauding a government headed by a literal ~former~ military dictator (and erstwhile genocidaire) because you are mad about a damn forum, especially when said government is in the business of killing its citizenry (both small and large scale).

In countries like this, are people even trying to rely on "white" Internet? In places like Belarus, certainly not. Many people just simply use ToR as their main browser.

Belarus is among the repressive countries that have not made it too difficult to get around censorship. Sure, sites get blocked, but you can fire up Tor or create a proxy with ssh -D and you are good.

Unfortunately, Nigeria (like several other countries in the region) is interested in the Chinese approach to filtering. The Great Firewall has been able to block Tor and SSH workarounds for many years now. So, the outlook is grim.

But everyone in China is using free internet at will, or are you joking? It's hardly possible to block it for people who actually want to access.

No, they aren’t. Foreigners in China often get around the Great Firewall through foreigner-specific SIM cards or VPNs. A tiny, tiny amount of locals is able and interested in avoiding the Great Firewall. But for the vast majority of Chinese, the Great Firewall is never overcome; few even feel motivation to evade censorship. Compare that to a situation like Belarus where nearly every computer-literate person is aware of what to do.

Currently, the ban is only a government boycott. Burari's wife deactivated her Twitter account. I expect his party members to follow suite.

At the moment Twitter is freely accessible in Nigeria.

Maybe in coming months, the Buhari government would work with China to enforce the ban.

> At the moment Twitter is freely accessible in Nigeria.

It very much is not and has not been (fully, freely) accessible since around midnight today local time. See https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1401075546604322817 for example.

Kudos to Nigeria. The government, and governmental policies of any country are for their citizens to decide, not for Silicon Valley elites to dictate. Any other time period elites trying to control other countries political affairs would be called for what it is -- imperialism.

Are the citizens deciding this, or is their government deciding for them? It seems like a lot of people are trying to circumvent the ban.

Nigeria is a (albeit flawed) democratic government with elections which the current President won in 2019. Jack Dorsey personally donated to protesters. Twitter also created an emoticon to support them.[1] Then Twitter decides to remove the sitting President's post.

We all saw how well the "Arab Spring" went. We don't need Big Tech to go and create more failed states. Strong democracy and good government never work being built top down.

[1] https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/twitter-u...

The current president already executed a coup d'etat against a democratic government once in the 1980s. How many of those has Jack Dorsey done?

A question for the ages.

It is honestly so frustrating seeing people talk about situations they obviously know nothing about. Imagine claiming to be arguing in support of freedom and democracy via applauding a man that literally deposed a civilian government and installed himself as a military dictator while he was in the army!

People are so preoccupied with the speck of "censorship" in a private company's eye that they completely neglect the log of actual, murderously violent authoritarianism in the eye of the side they're supporting.

I'm not even sure why I bother to participate in conversations about Nigeria outside of Nigerian spaces.

The fact that Nigeria is a democracy doesn’t mean much on its own. In the US, for example, conservative politicians consistently oppose issues such as abortion, gun control and healthcare even though a healthy majority of the population support them. Another commenter alleges that the current Nigerian government is very unpopular, which doesn’t paint this decision in a great light.

Also: it’s misleading to suggest Jack Dorsey or Twitter supported protests against the government. His donation and the hashtag were for #EndSARS, which is an anti–police brutality movement.

Doesn't the fact that these conservative politicians constantly get elected belie your statement that they are supported by a majority of the population? Trump opposed them all and yet won in 2016 and had a decent showing in 2020.

It used to be that everyone supported democracy -- the rural, the poor, the uneducated, along with urban, rich and educated all getting a say in their government. Not it seems some factions in the left have sold out to corporatocracy in a bid to fast track their favorite policies.

I don't think this is going to end well.

There are a lot of reasons that elected politicians don’t support the positions of most voters, one being that turnout of the voting-age population in the US tends to be just over 50% (with 2020 being an outlier). But I think we’re getting too deep into the analogy here. The point is that a democratically elected government is absolutely capable of making decisions opposed by a majority of its citizens.

In the USA it is well known that popular opinion has little effect on policy. The last time a popular legislation got through was the affordable care act more then 10 years ago, and even that was only a half step in the direction that people wanted (universal healthcare).

Knowing that there is little incentive for USA voters to actually vote for a candidate based on policy. Instead you pick the person you hate less.

Twitter has taken even greater steps against the same kind of violent messaging in the US itself. How does that fit into your theory about imperialism?

Twitter controlling political discourse in America is not imperialism, just corporatocracy. If Americans would like to live under such a system, so be it. Just keep your frankensteins out of our country please.

It's like as if the users want the tech elite to be the arbiters of their truth, handling 'accidental' banning of users who disagree and allowing the free-for-all manipulation of content that it only approves of (Even when it approves of lies) whilst also claiming to stopping 'disinformation' as so called 'mOdErATioN' whilst breaking their own rules.

These companies will never change and neither are your friends or are on your side.

They are on the side of profit.

It's astounding to watch both states and companies work so tirelessly to pretend that the contours of the internet are isomorphic with the current political borders of the planet.

The internet is under no obligation to recognize or respect those borders, and on sufficiently large time scales, certainly will not.

So what's all the tantrum throwing? Can't we let states be states, and let the internet be the internet, and then see which one emerges as the more human (and more humane) phenomenon?

A company deleted a tweet. A state has blocked access to the servers of that country insofar as it can control network access. What is the takeaway?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com