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Nigeria Twitter ban: As Nigeria threatens to arrest people who tweet, people defy the ban | The Washington Post

Nigeria’s telecom companies had officially blocked Twitter, and the attorney general vowed to prosecute those who found a way to use it, but Editi Effiong kept posting.

“Silence is the enemy,” he tweeted Sunday to his 139,000 followers.

The marketing executive in the country’s commercial capital, Lagos, understood the risk. This was no anonymous protest, he said — the government had his home address.

Effiong, 37, had worked on President Muhammadu Buhari’s digital campaign strategy during Nigeria’s 2015 election. Now he was urging everyone to defy the administration’s social media decree, announced Friday.

“The very act of tweeting has become a crime in the eyes of the government, but it is actually what we should all be doing,” Effiong said. “We should all be tweeting.”

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Source: Nigeria Twitter ban: As Nigeria threatens to arrest people who tweet, people defy the ban | The Washington Post