How seven months Twitter ban affected our livelihoods – Nigerian Influencers, vendors tell Neusroom
More than 220 days after placing a ban on Twitter operations in Nigeria, the Government, on Wednesday, January 12, 2021, lifted the ban as estimated loss from the ban hit about ₦553bn on Wednesday.
A statement by the government said Twitter has agreed to six resolutions with the Nigerian government before the lifting of the ban which came into effect on June 4, 2021, after the tech company took down a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari for violating its rules.
We sent an email to Twitter, the tech company is yet to confirm if it has agreed to the resolutions listed by the Nigerian Government.
Twitter, however, tweeted via its Public Policy page that it is ‘committed to Nigeria, where Twitter is used by people for commerce, cultural engagement, and civic participation.’
Beyond being a micro-blogging site, Twitter has also become a livelihood source for many young Nigerians who make up 74.22% of the country’s 213.9M population; due to the country’s high unemployment rate which the National Bureau of Statistics said rose to 33.3% in the fourth quarter of 2020. Since the ban became effective in June 2021, many social media influencers and online vendors who earn their living through Twitter said they suffered significant losses running into millions of naira.
Gbenga Sogbaike, the former CEO of Plaqad, a PR and marketing technology company, told Neusroom in June 2021 that many Nigerians earn their living off Twitter – influencers/creators, agencies, SMEs.
“Twitter is a great marketing tool for businesses, and if they can no longer use the app, what do you think will happen? Revenue loss, job losses etc,” he said.
Pamilerin Adegoke, a Twitter influencer with 615k Twitter followers, told Neusroom that his engagements reduced drastically during the period the ban was in place. ‘Some people could not afford VPN so they had to leave, that alone reduced the amount of people that interact with your post,’ he said.
Twitter is a leading platform contributing to the Nigerian influencer marketing industry. The 2020 Influencer Compensation Report by Plaqad revealed that Nigerian influencers have been able to drive a good increase in terms of investment return for brands.
During the ban, not only did Influencer’s engagement reduce but brands withdrew from the space.
Elder Seun Alaofin, another Twitter influencer with 34.1k followers, said ‘For the first five months there was a delay on most of the big jobs we had as influencers, most of the big brands did not put out content on Twitter.’
According to the NetBlocks Cost of Shutdown Tool, Nigeria’s economy made a loss of ₦103.79M ($250,600) every hour of the Twitter ban. The Ban that started on June 4 and has ended 222 days after has led Nigeria to lose a total of about ₦553bn.
Despite being a promising platform for driving sales, a lot of vendors left the space because it became stressful to use via VPN.
Eluwa Christiana, a vendor, said the number of orders she got declined drastically. From about 10 customers a week to 2, sometimes none.
‘Using VPN was not an option because you had to pay for VPN and it was just stressful,’ she added.
Following one bad experience with VPN, Janet Ebisa, a Twitter vendor had to close down her Twitter business page. ‘My engagements suffered and the vibe. It felt even unsafe to use the VPN,” she disclosed.
After months of overall loss to the economy through the Twitter ban, the Nigerian government is now devising means to regulate the usage of the platform as the 2023 general elections approach.
The statement by Kashifu Abdullahi, Chairman Technical Committee Nigeria-Twitter Engagement, said Twitter had agreed to enrol the government on its Partner Support Portal which allows the government to report posts that violate Twitter rules. Many Nigerians believe this opportunity would be abused by the government as used to clamp down on critics.
