The government in Abuja announced on Friday it had "indefinitely suspended" the US-based platform, following Twitter's censorship of Buhari. The move was made because of "the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria's corporate existence," said Information Minister Lai Mohammed.
Nigeria's TV and press regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), will also start the process of "licensing" all social media platforms in the country, the government said. In a twist of irony, the decision was announced on Twitter. Also, the ban doesn't appear to have gone into effect just yet, and Nigerians are reportedly flocking to virtual private networks to circumvent it.
The Nigerian government also missed an easy opportunity to clobber Twitter with its own wokeness cudgel and accuse CEO Jack Dorsey of being racist and Islamophobic - considering Buhari is both African and Muslim.
All that aside, however, Abuja's response stands in stark contrast to that of official Washington from a year ago, when Twitter censored then-US President Donald Trump - and then the White House account - citing the same pretext of "glorifying violence" or "threatening harm" to individuals or groups. Trump responded by signing an executive order intended to crack down on social media censorship... and nothing happened.
The career bureaucrats in DC simply ignored the president's orders and stood by while Twitter, Facebook and YouTube helped 'fortify' the 2020 elections in favor of Democrat Joe Biden - who revoked Trump's order last month, without bothering to offer an explanation.
Trump's toothless response to censorship eventually led to Twitter banning his account after the January 6 Capitol riot - while he was still the sitting president - and the other Big Tech platforms following suit. Not only is he banned from having an account, but others interviewing him will get censored for daring to broadcast his "voice."
Yet most of the US media and civil libertarian groups see nothing wrong with this, and are even arguing that such censorship - using corporations as proxies for the government - isn't violating the First Amendment.
By contrast, it took Nigeria two days to respond to Twitter's censorship of its president with a ban on the platform. It may only amount to a symbolic gesture, but it sends a clear message to San Francisco that this kind of behavior by Big Tech will not be tolerated.
Buhari's critics have argued that the ban is "not in keeping with democracy, the rule of law, and the independence of the media." But Twitter's censorship is? Who's in charge here, an elected government of a sovereign country, or a corporation on the other side of the world? That's really the question here.
Because the American civil war ended in 1865, and long passed out of living memory, Biden may be able to get away with pseudo-historical narratives comparing the Capitol riot to it. Nigeria's civil war against the Biafran separatists ended in 1970, and claimed more lives. So when Buhari warns those currently "misbehaving" that its veterans will treat them "in the language they understand," that is indeed a threat - to separatists.
When it censored Trump on the same grounds a year ago, Twitter had posted messages in support of Black Lives Matter, making its politics abundantly clear. The Nigerian government looked at the company banning Buhari but not the current Biafran leader, and concluded that Twitter supported separatists. No government can tolerate that and survive for long, any more than having corporations dictate the terms of their politics - as Trump's own experience clearly showed.
About The Author
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Reader Comments
So why aren't these career bureaucrats fired ? I guess that goes to show that the US Prez is no more than a puppet. Any normal person could be forgiven to think that the Prez can fire personnel who don't even try to get the job done.
What is needed is the abandonment of the idea that people need to be governed. As long as this idea prevails, Liberty fails. We don't need a system of control, control of the economy, the money, or behavior (which is gov't is). What we need is what the Lakota lived by--a simple code of laws that are not adulterated, augmented, or in any way tinkered with. And a simple tribunal that ensures that those laws are enforced up violators--not by robbing them of their property or autonomy, but exclusion from society, just as the American Natives have lived by for generations.
Forrest McDonald is the first historian I've encountered that pulled all these facts together without making conspiratorial arguments. His books are the kind to sit back and reflect on what you've just read.
Like Anthony deJasay, Frederic Bastiat, and Lysander Spooner, I am opposed to politics and government in all its manifestations. Government is inherently infantalizing, which is why the governed will never grow into self-government.
I've come to three guiding principles which strike me far better than that vague, contradictory nonsense put into the Declaration. It started with listening to what the Lakota people said in Dances with Wolves: No person has the right to tell another what they should do. This I followed with No person has the right to take a person's property without their consent in agreeable exchange. Along with that is No person has the right to take another person's life. I'm sure there are a few others, but if these three were held supremely inviolable by tribunal, it would resolve a great deal of social and economic problems. They are statements in the negative, which like in science, are the only surety of justice and equality BEFORE THE LAW. Positive statements and actions are what has gotten us all into trouble, thank you Hamilton. What I learned about the Apache tribal order was also significant. The reason they were able to defy the US Army for so long was because they had no appointed leader. Tribe members followed after who they thought were the most effective, and freely left one for another if they had a different mind. Hierarchies is where all the problems prosper, with the attendant notions of superior intelligence, abilities, and inherited nobility/royalty.
Lysander can be downloaded from the web, and takes perhaps 2 hours of reading to come up to speed. Like any political philosophy, he has some weakness in his views. But having a good grasp of the basic principles he discusses would do every citizen a lot of good.
Elias Canetti, who wrote Crowds and Power , discusses the various ways people loose their heads in group settings, supporting Heinlein's observation that a committee is a life form of six legs and no brain. It has been shown repeatedly in organizational research that the level of intelligent action in group settings to devolve to the lowest level of participant.
These days I just look forward to my imminent demise, with the hope that in passing, I will find a more sane and functional social order in the next phase.
My niece wants to be able to pick my brain for the know-how packed away there. She forgets that once a person attains their 70s, more is lost to senility than what one ever knew. Figure how that works!
I post here because my children have heard it all and are bored, and the grrkids don't give a frick. There's this latent hope some poor devil reads my tripe and finds amusement at the least.
I read that in my teens and saw it applied in spades to the USA.