Twitter’s action touches on Nigeria’s sovereignty ― Presidential aide

Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to the president on Special Intervention, Ismaeel Ahmed, has said that the face-off between the Federal Government and Twitter was a matter that bordered on Nigeria’s sovereignty.

“It is unacceptable, no company should have that kind of power over a sovereign President,” the presidential aide told Channels Television.

The social media company had pulled down the tweet of the president in which he said “we will treat them in the language they understand.”

Ismaeel who spoke to Channels during the state of the nation programme said the government too should be blamed for not being proactive to open communication channels earlier to pave way for the issue to be resolved at a high level.

He said the Nigerian government was not proactive in establishing a channel of communication between itself, Twitter and other influential social media platforms for its citizens.

Otherwise, the faceoff according to him would have been resolved through such communication.

According to him, the power exercised by Twitter, a registered company, was too overbearing on the powers of the President of a sovereign nation.

He said: “As a young person I want to tweet every day, I want to have the opportunity to speak my mind, get informed every day, so I hope that there will be a resolution because I heard that, I do not know if it is true, Twitter has reached out to the government.

“Government on its own too has not done what it should do, which is to have a sort of formal liaison channel between us and major social media companies that reach far more of our citizens than the conventional media do and yet, we do not have a channel of communication with them. That should have happened immediately, after the #Endsars.

“We should have opened communication with Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, so that things like this could be resolved without getting to the stage it got to.”

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