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Access denied: the social and economic costs of Nigeria’s Twitter blackout  · Global Voices

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2021-07-01 10:30:03

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Young Nigerians discussing the contents of a web page opened on a smartphone. Image by James Moore200 via Wikimedia Commons , March 27, 2021, ( CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Many Nigerians are deeply feeling the loss of Twitter weeks into its shutdown by the government. Aside from the obvious violation of online freedom of expression of its users, the suspension also hurts Nigerians who use the platform for commercial and social activities.

On June 4, 2021, the Nigerian government announced it was suspending Twitter from operating in the country after the company deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari. In the tweet, Buhari threatened pro-Biafra activists from the southeastern part of the country of a repeat of the 1967-1970 Biafra Civil War , which killed an estimated 500,000 to 2 million civilians.

“Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Biafra war. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand,” Buhari wrote in the now-deleted Tweet .

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