Nigeria lifts Twitter ban

Nigeria has lifted its ban on Twitter, seven months after clamping down on the social networking site. The social media platform was suspended last June after the company deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari about regional secessionists. BBC News reports that the authorities accused the firm of siding with the secessionists. However, the government said it was reversing the ban after Twitter agreed to conditions including opening a local office in Nigeria. Some users had continued to access the site after the suspension using virtual private networks, but the government vowed to clamp down on those still tweeting – including media organisations.

Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa lost a combined $1.93bn because of widespread Internet shutdowns by regimes during crackdowns on opposition and civic society last year. This is contained in the Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2021 report, released this week. It notes that ‘75% of global Internet outages were associated with additional human rights abuses, an increase of almost 80% compared with 2020’. A report on the News24 site notes that the biggest violator of people's access to the Internet in Africa last year was flagged as Nigeria, at a cost of $1.45bn. Nigeria was closely followed by Ethiopia where the Internet was shut down for 8 760 hours at a cost of $164.5m as part of the government's abuse of the ‘right to peaceful assembly’. Sudan follows Ethiopia with 605 hours as the government moved to curtail the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of the press between October and November.