How international locations Nigeria seeks to emulate fare in human improvement

The Nigerian government has shown that its resolve to regulate online media is undaunted.

With an earlier social media bill stalling at the parliament due to public outcry, the government has now plotted another route to censor the media.

Information minister Lai Mohammad earlier in the week told the parliament to empower the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission by extending the agency’s power to censor the media to include all online media through the ongoing amendment of the agency’s Act currently being considered.

Mr Mohammed would double down on this, during “Politics Nationwide,’’ a Radio Nigeria call-in programme on Tuesday, saying that the regulation of social media platforms is becoming a global practice.

He said that most countries have come to terms with the power wielded by the tech giants and how governments are vulnerable to such powers. Hence, the need for regulation

“Singapore, Algeria, Pakistan, Turkey regulate social media, Australia has done so,” he said.

He added that the UK had initiated a new law that places a fine up to 18 million pounds (about N10.8 billion) on social media companies if they failed to stamp out online abuses.

He said Google was fined 220 million euros (about N110 billion) on June 7 by French Competition Regulator for abusing its dominance in the online advertising market in France.

The minister also cited Pakistan as a country Nigeria is looking at as the South Asian country has approved a new set of rules to regulate social media by ordering companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even TikTok to register and open offices in Pakistan.

He added that in compliance with the new online broadcasting rule of Turkey, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video had obtained licences from that country’s broadcasting authority.

Although Mr Mohammed’s narrative is flawed – for example, the kind of regulation in Australia is totally different from Nigeria’s Twitter ban or regulatory plan – most of the countries Nigeria seeks to emulate ranked poorly in the press freedom and human development index.

A PREMIUM TIMES’ comparative analysis shows that of the top fifteen countries on the 2021 World Press Freedom Index, eleven of them are among the top fifteen countries on the latest Human Development Index.

They include Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Costa Rica, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Germany.

The exceptions are Jamaica, Portugal, Canada (which ranks 16th country with the freest press), and Estonia.

Nigeria ranked 120th of 180 countries on the press freedom index in 2020 and 161st of 189 nations on the 2020 human development index (HDI), down from 158th in 2014.

HDI ranked all countries by whether or not their people had freedom and opportunity to live a life they valued.

How do the countries cited by Mr Mohammed control the internet and how do they fare on the press freedom and developmental indices?

Turkey

Turkey blocked access to Twitter in March 2014 in the run-up to local elections, PREMIUM TIMES had earlier reported. The move was reportedly carried out to stem a stream of leaked wiretapped recordings of senior officials that had appeared on the site, prompting then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to say he would “root out” the network.

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