Nigeria Was Right To Ban Dangerous Twitter At The Time – Lai Mohammed

Lai Mohammed

Former Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has defended the Federal Government’s decision to suspend Twitter, now known as X, in Nigeria. He recently insisted that the move was necessitated by the platform’s reckless conduct and the threat it posed to national security.

According to him, the suspension was not intended to silence dissenting voices, but to reduce the spread of fake news, hate speech and disinformation capable of undermining national stability.

Lai added that the government’s engagement with social media platforms over misinformation predated the suspension.

His words, “I started the campaign against fake news and disinformation in 2017. I knew the dangerous dimension it was taking. An unregulated social media space was becoming a threat to society.

When we suspended Twitter, it was because it was becoming reckless. We warned them several times. Social media had reached a stage where it was becoming dangerous to everybody.

The President asked me only one question: do I think a country should do so? And I said yes, based on our discussions and the risks we were seeing.

Twitter was not registered in Nigeria to do business. The agreement they later signed with us, which is contained in this book, is evidence that we did the right thing.

You must not push freedom to the extent that you set one part of the country against the other. We saw how social media was used to direct attacks on institutions.

This is about documenting history from an insider’s viewpoint — how decisions were made, how misinformation overshadowed facts, and how media was used to shape national narratives.”

WOW.