THEHACKCITY

Nigeria said on Monday it was in discussions with Twitter after it suspended the US social media giant’s services in the country, branding its use as “unpatriotic”. The Twitter suspension has provoked an outcry from the international community and rights groups who denounced it as a threat to freedom of expression in Africa’s most populous country. Nigeria announces talks with Twitter after ban, as Ecowas court bars government crackdown on users, Nigeria said it was halting the platform’s operations indefinitely on Friday, two days after Twitter deleted a comment from President Muhammadu Buhari’s account referring to civil unrest that the firm said violated its rules.  “There are discussions ongoing with Twitter, we will see how that progresses, so I cannot say for now the duration of the suspension,” Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama said after a meeting with diplomats on the issue. “There are conversations, yes, with our partn...

Facebook targeting Nigerian learners with educational app Sabee. From Facebook office in Lagos, Nigeria the first products to come out of this office: a mobile application aimed at education called Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian Pidgin. The app aims to connect learners and teachers in online communities to make educational opportunities more accessible. The app was briefly published on Google Play by the NPE Team, Facebook’s internal research and development group, which typically focuses on new social experiences in areas such as dating, audio, music, video, messaging and more. While NPE Team apps sometimes inform about wider efforts on Facebook, the group has not yet created an app to become a standalone Facebook product. Many of its earlier applications are also excluded, including (somewhat unfortunately) the online creator of zine, e.g. The Hobbi video app, the CatchUp app to call, Bump to find friends, the community app for podcasts and more. However, Sabee represents a...

Twitter operation suspended in Nigeria. The statement announcing Twitter’s ban was announced today (4th June 2021) on Twitter via Nigeria’s ministry of information and culture Twitter handle. Nigeria’s information and culture minister Alhaji Lai Mohammed announced Twitter’s suspension in a statement by his media aide Segun Adeyemi. “The Federal Government has suspended, indefinitely, the operations of the microblogging and social networking service, Twitter, in Nigeria,” Mohammed said. The Nigerian government’s spokesman said “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence” as the reason for the suspension. Today’s announcement is a culmination of events that have happened this past week. Yesterday, Twitter deleted tweets and videos of President Muhammadu Buhari making threats of punishment to a sect called IPOB in the South-Eastern part of the country after he blamed them for attacks on government buildings. He then refe...