Twitter restricted in Nigeria after deletion of President’s Tweet

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NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Twitter in Nigeria from the morning of Saturday 5 June 2021. The incident comes after a Tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari was removed for breaching the Twitter platform rules. Service was restored at midnight on the morning of 13 January 2022, with a recorded incident duration of 222 days.

Network data show that access to the Twitter platform and backend servers were restricted on leading networks including MTN, Globacom, Airtel and 9mobile.

Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed and his media aide Segun Adeyemi issued a statement on Friday that forebode the ban, citing the persistent “use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”

Media reported that the service was initially still working on the night of Friday 4 June 2021, with technical restrictions are found to have come into place some hours later. The company’s link sharing service t.co was also impacted. Affected users are able to access Twitter using VPN services which can work around network restrictions.

Further reading:

With thanks to EiE Nigeria, Paradigm Initiative and the Twitter user community for coordinating platform checks across Nigeria.

Methodology

Internet performance and service reachability are determined via NetBlocks web probe privacy-preserving analytics. Each measurement consists of latency round trip time, outage type and autonomous system number aggregated in real-time to assess service availability and latency in a given country. Network providers and locations are enumerated as vantage point pairs. The root cause of a service outage may be additionally corroborated by means of traffic analysis and manual testing as detailed in the report.

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