Nigeria asks Google to block banned groups from YouTube

ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria requested Google to dam the usage of YouTube channels and livestreams by banned teams and terrorist organizations within the nation, Info Minister Lai Mohammed stated on Thursday.

Nigeria has been exploring methods to manage social media utilization within the nation, Africa’s most populous. The nation is house to hundreds of thousands of web customers and platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Fb and Tiktok are standard.

YouTube “channels and emails containing names of banned teams and their associates shouldn’t be allowed on Google platforms,” Mohammed stated he instructed Google executives in Abuja, the nation’s capital.

Charles Murito, Google’s sub-Saharan African director for presidency affairs and public coverage, in a press release stated the corporate already has measures to deal with the Nigerian authorities’s considerations.

These measures embody a system for educated customers to flag troublesome content material, he added. “We share the identical objectives and targets,” Murito stated. “We don’t want our platform for use for in poor health functions.”

The minister stated the federal government was notably involved with on-line actions by the Indigenous Folks of Biafra (IPOB). The federal government has labeled IPOB, a gaggle campaigning for the secession of a southeastern area of Nigeria, a “terrorist group.”

The YouTube considerations are a part of an effort by the federal government, the minister stated, to guard Nigerian web customers from dangerous results of social media, particularly forward of a presidential election subsequent yr.

Nigeria suspended Twitter in June 2021 and blocked entry to customers after the social media large eliminated a put up from President Muhammadu Buhari threatening to punish regional secessionists.

The federal government lifted the Twitter ban six months later.

(Reporting by Felix Onuah and Camillus Eboh; Writing by Chijioke Ohuocha. Edited by Paulo Prada.)