‘I Should Have Banned Twitter, Facebook,’ Trump Praises Buhari After Twitter Ban In Nigeria
Former United States President, Donald J. Trump, has praised President Muhammadu Buhari after his administration banned Nigerians from accessing Twitter, saying he should have done the same thing.
Twitter is seen as one of Nigeria’s civil society tools, with more than 17 million of the country’s population using the microblogging service, according to Nigerian Economic Summit Group.
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Trump, who was banned from most U.S. based mainstream social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a sitting president, backed Buhari’s ban on the platform.
Theweek quoted him as saying, “Congratulations to the country of Nigeria, who just banned Twitter because they banned their president. More countries should ban Twitter and Facebook for not allowing free and open speech- all voices should be heard.”
On Friday, the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, announced Twitter’s suspension over “persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”
But prior to the suspension, Twitter had deleted Buhari’s tweet and froze his account for 12 hours for violating its rule.
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Buhari had threatened a seperatist group in the South East with the “Nigerian civil war” treatment in the tweet.
The President said, “Those of us in the fields for 30 months (during the 1967-1970 Biafra-Nigerian Civil War), who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.”
Buhari also said, “We are going to be very hard sooner than later.”
Meanwhile, Trump has remained banned from the platform following alleged inciting tweets during the 2020 US Election.
A day after the Capitol Hill siege by Trump supporters, Facebook announced that it was blocking Trump from all its platforms.
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Trump, according to TheWeek, said that, “In the meantime, competitors will emerge and take hold. Who are they to dictate good and evil if they themselves are evil? Perhaps I should have done it when I was President. But Zuckerberg kept calling me and coming to the White House for dinner telling me how great I was. 2024?”
