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After the social media company deleted a post by President Muhammadu Buhari threatening to violently suppress unrest in the southeast, Nigeria blocked Twitter from its mobile network.
The vast majority of Internet users in Africa’s most populous countries use mobile data to access the Internet.
Information Minister Lai Muhammad said on Friday afternoon that the government has suspended Twitter because of “continuous use of the platform for activities that can undermine the survival of Nigerian businesses”.
The website can be accessed throughout the night, but by Saturday morning, it can only be accessed via fixed-line broadband.
According to a December report, approximately 68 million Nigerians have subscribed to mobile data plans, which are usually shared among several users, a figure that dwarfs the number of people using fixed broadband Learn Provided by the World Bank and the mobile operator trade organization GSMA.
Twitter said it is investigating the “deeply concerning” suspension and will provide an update.
A few months ago, Twitter chose nearby Ghana as its first African office, bypassing Nigeria, the largest market on the African continent. This was seen as a sign of Ghana’s more relaxed business environment and Nigeria’s more fickle regime.
The Nigerian government has proposed the idea of regulating social media, especially since the widespread protests against police brutality last year.
The latest move is after Twitter on Wednesday Take down Buhari’s tweet This threatened the perpetrators of violence in the turbulent southeast of the country, referring to the brutal civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s.
The government blamed the banned separatist Biafra indigenous people’s group for the surge in violence in the region, which included dramatic escapes, the burning of election offices and the killing of police officers.
“Many people who misbehave today are too young to realize the destruction and loss of life that occurred during the Nigerian civil war,” Buhari wrote in a now-deleted post on Tuesday.
“Those of us who have worked on the battlefield for 30 months and have experienced war will treat them in a language they understand.”
Twitter stated that the statement violated its abuse policy, which prohibits “content that hopes, hopes, promotes, incites, or expresses a desire for the death, serious bodily injury, or serious illness of an individual or group of people.”
Buhari ruled as a military dictator in the early 1980s. He participated in the 1967-1970 civil war, also known as the Biafra War, and it is estimated that about 1 million Biafras died of starvation.
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