The Nigerian government proceeded to restrict the usage of the bird app after the president’s controversial tweets were deleted from the platform on 2nd of June. This move from twitter presented the perfect excuse of the executive arm of the government to carry its plan of the overall censoring of social media in the country. To buttress the fact that this plan may be easily instigated, the judicial system has been on strike for over 60 days so any attempt from the public to counter this decision will be stalled. Should we except that this strike will continue long enough for them to move a motion by the legislative arm of government to pass a bill into law, who knows…
To say that Nigerians cannot do without twitter is an understatement. Most people use it as a source of information to stay abreast of what is going on in the country. Some use it to promote their business, some use it as a source of income due to their influence, others are just there for pure bants! The restriction of the app doesn’t portray the country in a good light. It is viewed as an attempt to silence the voices of the people who have the rights to express themselves. The decision will also dwindle investors confidence and deter them from sinking funds into the economy and tag the government as “unfriendly”.
On a lighter note, we spoke to a few twitter enthusiasts and avid users to find out how well they’ve been coping with the twitter ban and most of them seem to have found a way around it. VPN!
One person’s response goes “I honestly find it so stressful because I always forget to turn off VPN whenever I’m trying to log on to other sensitive applications on my phone.” This is because certain apps can detect VPN usage and restrict such users from accessing their applications.
Another person goes “I’m still using the bird app but I’m in America.” and laughs. She was clearly enjoying the fact that Nigerians have found a way around the ban and continuing their usage as if nothing happened.
One of our respondents was thrilled at the fact that people are still “dragging” on the app as usual. “My people are still dragging as always. We still have twitter trends for Nigeria which is great. Thank you, Jack!”. He was referring to some settings upgrade done by twitter that still allows users in Nigeria see tweet trends from the country.
A user we spoke to was concerned about the use of VPN and said “People need to be careful with downloading VPN because they don’t know how secure it is. The company may be harvesting sensitive information from their devices which isn’t safe.” His concerns are clearly valid based on his line of work in cybersecurity.
What we gathered in conclusion is that there’s still a significant number of Nigerians in Nigeria using the app via VPN. Will this be the new normal forever? Will other social media apps be restricted? We cannot say for sure but one thing is certain, Nigerians will always find a way to bypass any restriction.
