Twitter Ban: You Are Pushing Advertisers Into Unemployment Market, AAAN Tells FG

The  Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria has said that the ban on Twitter by the Federal Government has pushed a lot of its members who rely on the micro-blogging site for advertisement into joblessness. 

Steve Babaeko, the Chief Executive Officer, X3M Media Group and the President, Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria said this during a monitored programme on TVC News.  

On June 4, the Minister of Information, Lai Muhammed, announced the suspension of Twitter over an inciting  tweet of President Muhammadu Buhari deleted on the platform.

Buhari had in the tweet threatened to treat a secessionist groups in the southeast’  “in the language they understand.”  

But the platform which has an estimated 40 million Nigerian users has been a source of business for influencers, advertisers and small businesses seeking patronage.

 Babaeko  said, “This is a country that is just coming out of a pandemic. We went into our second recession in five years in 2020 and now if you say you are going to ban something like Twitter that is a market space for  the younger generation and you just finished banning cryptocurrency.

“Now the overall interest of the government is that it wants to secure peace but if more people go out of work and go into the labour market, those people who are going into the unemployment market, are ready recruits for people who want to recruit people into crime.

“There is no way any positive solution can come out of this ban and it is also important to add that Nigeria is not the only country that is having to deal with this new reality that is on social media. 

“There are two ways to deal with this. There is a middle ground to those two ways. There is the very extreme way which is what China is probably doing right now, they banned Twitter out rightly. There is the Indian model.”

On the Indian model, he explained that the government should have sought for a court injunction and discussed with Twitter over the ailing accounts.

Adding to the issues with Twitter, the  government is also planning to regulate news and social media platforms and will begin clampdown on defaulters soon.

The AAAN President said, “If there are specific accounts you think are doing something that you think is really adverse, you can have those conversations with Twitter. Twitter has its  rules, they will weigh your submission versus their own rule and make a decision.

” But this outright ban, you now join the people who are innocent, who are just transacting their normal business and trying to make a living on digital media and you join them with the guys who the government probably have issues with and now people are losing revenue and you are throwing more people into poverty.

“On behalf of our members who still do business on Twitter, on behalf of ordinary Nigerians who do business on Twitter, on behalf of digital agencies who almost exclusively buy their trade on digital media for the government to relook this decision and find an amicable way of settling it.”

The association’s boss added that the ban was having a massive impact on members, adding that the ban would further affect direct investment into the Nigerian fintech space.