Twitter blocked in Nigeria after deleting a tweet by its president
theverge.com"We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society."
Yet they see no irony in being self-appointed arbiters of who gets to say what including heads of state. By their very own statement they are violating the human rights of others by censoring and deplatforming users are they not?
It would be ironic if they said that access to Twitter was an essential human right in modern society.
But their argument is that access to the internet in its entirety - whether Twitter or Mastodon or Hacker News or Stormfront or Substack or Zombo - is an essential human right, and a government should not block its people from any one site. Which is a fair statement. Twitter hosts who they want to host, Stormfront hosts who they want to host, and the government should get in the way of neither.
Twitter has never entirely prevented anybody from accessing it (afaik - I first encountered the platform in ~2010 so correct me if I'm wrong). Tweets and media from non-protected accounts can be viewed without needing an account at all, so everybody can see the discussion happening; the criticism of Twitter is over whether or not everybody can participate (and even then, even people with suspended accounts will often create new ones and jump back in).
On the other hand not only is my government actively trying to make it a criminal offence to participate in discussions on Twitter, they have already mobilised the ISPs to block actual access to the platform itself (some people are currently circumventing that with VPNs, but we all know that they (especially the free ones) are not bulletproof).
The abuse of state power should be obvious, especially to the people on here who claim to care about censorship, but they seem to be too caught up in scoring a petty point against a platform they don't like. As I've said elsewhere, I wonder if they think of us Nigerians as real people at all.
I've seen this exact sentiment expressed more times than I can remember. While I don't consider internet access to be an inalienable human right, the response from Twitter is obviously mealy mouthed. What they are actually saying is "Access to, and use of, Twitter, subject to our terms of service and content moderation policy, is an essential human right in modern society."
Exactly, they believe they are a supranational entity with the right to dictate what is and what isn't acceptable speech world-wide. I'm no fan of dictators or governments who violate their own constitutions, but that does not give Twitter the right to set the rules of speech world-wide.
There have already been 3 HN stories about this in the past day: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=twitter+nigeria
This one has the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27404125
That's ok. Just like Twitter operates its platform as it sees fit, blocking and censoring things they dislike, Nigeria is its own sovereign country and operates according to the "laws of the land". If Twitter doesn't like it, they are free to start their own country and do whatever they please over there.