The 2021 Nigerian Twitter ban: A text-analytics and survey insight into public reactions and outcomes in the early weeks of the ban

Abstract

The suspension of the micro-blogging platform, Twitter, by the federal government of Nigeria on 5 June 2021 for ‘consistent non-removal of inciting and divisive contents’, undoubtedly generated mixed feelings among social media users in and outside the country. Hinging on Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur’s Media Systems Dependency theory, this study adopts a combination of text mining, sentiment analysis and survey approaches to make evident social media users’ reactions to the Twitter ban in 2021. Of the 3885 social posts that were sampled across three platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Nairaland) between 5 June and 16 July 2021, 73% decry while just 27% extol the Twitter ban action. The Nvivo word frequency results showed that the top five keywords used across the sampled posts were: ‘end’, ‘#twitterban’, ‘unlawful’, ‘suspension’ and ‘Nigeria’ ( n = 11,925; 24%), suggesting that majority of users were unhappy with the shutdown. The complementary opinion sampling conducted on students of Nile University of Nigeria revealed that the majority of the 319 sampled respondents (264; 83%) responded to VPNs to access and use Twitter despite the ban. Among the daily Twitter habits of the respondents most affected by the shutdown were Trending Topics Search (22%), Social Engagement (20%), Daily News Search (20%), Product Search (13%), Product Marketing (10%), Customer Relations (9%), Jobs Search (4%) and others (2%). The study recommends the consideration of better sanctioning means for erring social media companies that will not stifle the exchange of ideas online in this democratic age.