Nigeria has suspended the use of Twitter across the country, just days after a tweet posted by President Muhammadu Buhari was removed for what the social media platform said was a violation of its rules. Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture, announced the decision in a…
Authorities in the United States filed charges on Wednesday against three men – two of them Twitter employees – who they say used internal access to user data to help Saudi Arabia track its dissidents, such as the late Jamal Khashoggi. The charges against the three, filed by the U.S….
Both Twitter and Facebook made big announcements on Wednesday, as the social media companies seek to curb fake accounts, abuse in political ads, and the potential to spread fake news or incite violence through hate speech. Facebook announced it removed three Russia-linked networks of accounts, pages and groups that targeted…
Social media giant Facebook, with more than 1.5 billion active users across the planet each day, experienced a massive failure on Wednesday that was still unresolved early Thursday morning. The outage, affecting Instagram and WhatsApp too, affected North America, parts of Europe, Russia and beyond. In Africa, frustrated users from…
Have you been targeted by hostile trolls on Twitter? You’re not alone, and if you’re a female politician or journalist the odds are you’ve already encountered the experience plenty of times. A study of 288,000 tweets sent to 778 such women in 2017 demonstrated a pattern of abuse that’s especially…
As if Morocco’s FIFA World Cup bid isn’t already contentious enough, now a Twitter message from United States President Donald Trump has sent FIFA officials toward the guidelines on undue political influence over the World Cup host selection process. “The U.S. has put together a STRONG bid w/ Canada &…
Kenyan officials have proposed new regulations that would impose a fine, jail time or both for using mobile SMS and social media platforms to promote “dissemination of undesirable political messages.” Kenyan citizens are encouraged to anonymously report “potential inflammatory content,” a move that could add even more contention to a…
Social media users who depend on Facebook and Twitter found themselves shutdown on Tuesday morning as a wide swath of Asia, parts of Australia and the Pacific West Coast of the United States experienced Facebook outages. And Twitter outages. And Instagram outages. The real-time outage map at Down Detector showed…
In Burundi, a spokesman and senior advisor to President Pierre Nkurunziza has launched a series of social media messages condemning a global human rights organization’s unconventional campaign to warn against genocide. Willy Nyamitwe continued his Twitter storm early Wednesday against International Federation for Human Rights and the #Stopthismovie campaign. The…
A twitter fight among politicians in Nigeria has caught the eye of the public. On Sunday, the Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, and a serving Senator, Ben Bruce got into a twitter dispute after Japheth Omojuwa, a popular Nigerian blogger, tweeted that ne would never take Bruce seriously. “The reason…
Obama is set to visit Kenya for the first time since becoming President from July 24 to 26 for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) which he will co-host with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. In preparation for Obama’s visit the Nairobi Government has started to ‘beautify’ certain areas of the city….