Twitter Ban: How Buhari, Trump Reacted To Flagging Of Tweets
On Friday, the Federal Government of Nigeria announced the indefinite suspension of Twitter operations in the country.
The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed gave the directive after the American microblogging company deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s “civil war” tweet for violating its rules.
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The move also came after Mohammed had described the flagging of Buhari’s tweets as suspicious.
Buhari had in the tweet made reference to the Biafra-Nigeran civil war while threatening to deal with secession agitators in the country.
But Mohammed told newsmen on Thursday that Buhari’s tweets were directed at those destroying public institutions in parts of the country.
Mohammed, on Friday, said the “persistent use of the platform” by citizens were “capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”
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THE WHISTLER reported that Twitter had similarly deleted the tweets of former United States President, Donald Trump, while he was still in government.
It also flagged tweets by the White House which contained Trump’s tweets.
Trump had reacted by criticizing Twitter on his social media accounts and urging his political affiliates to work towards restricting the social media internet space influence.
Trump had said that Twitter “coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me. Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long.”
His Republican colleagues in the U.S. Congress also summoned Twitter’s owner, Jack Dorsey, to explain his actions against Trump.
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THE WHISTLER recalls that the social media giant had on January 9, permanently suspended Trump’s account with over 88 million followers over his refusal to stop “further incitement of violence” through his utterances after he lost the November 3rd U.S. presidential election to President Joe Biden.
Twitter was not banned during and after Trump’s era.
