The decision by President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to ban Twitter in Nigeria in June has dealt a blow to its revenue ambitions.
According to Netblocks Cost of Shutdown Tools, which uses the classic Free Digital App GDP impact technique, Nigeria has lost at least $243 million in the past 51 days since the Twitter shutdown.
Despite this, Twitter on Thursday posted stronger-than-expected earnings for the second quarter thanks to growing advertising demand across all geographic regions and types of ad products.
The San Francisco-based company earned $65.6 million, or 8 cents per share, in the April-June quarter. That’s up from a loss of $1.38 billion, or $1.75 per share, a year earlier.
In Nigeria, Twitter recorded $1.19 billion in revenue in Q2 2021, against the $683.4 million Twitter reported for the corresponding period of Q2 2020.
The United Nations, foreign capitals from Washington to London and rights groups have all condemned the ban as a threat to freedom of expression.
Nigeria’s broadcast regulator took a step further, ordering television and radio channels to suspend their Twitter accounts and stop using the social media giant for news, branding its use as “unpatriotic.”
Even using a VPN to access the platform would lead to investigation and possible suspension of broadcast licenses.
For a young channel like News Central, expanding but still fighting for its place in the market, the Twitter ban is a setback.
“We largely depend on the referrals we get from Twitter to attract to our YouTube Channel, and to our channel on the satellite StarTimes,” Oladayo Martins, head of the digital for News Central told AFP.
“The last report shows a drop of 40 percent of our viewers in the past five days. We are a pan-African channel, but driven mostly by the Nigerian youth.”
In Africa’s largest economy, three-quarters of the population of 200 million are younger than 24 — a generation that is also hyper-connected to social media.
Young activists turned to Twitter last year to organize the #EndSARS protests against police brutality that eventually grew into the largest demonstrations in Nigeria’s modern history before they were repressed.
For broadcasters, social media is more than an essential tool.
“We show our lives on Facebook, we show our lives on Instagram, but when we want to have a conversation or when we want to debate social issues, we use Twitter,” said Tolulope Adeleru-Balogun, the head of programming.
One of the chain’s flagship programmes, NC Trendz, discusses hot topics on the Web with its trends and hashtags to give a pulse of society.
“We used to talk about gender-based issues, in Uganda we followed the opponent Bobi Wine house arrest, we used it in South Africa also during the lockdown,” she said.
“It is an important barometer for us to understand and know what a big proportion of people say in their country. Africa is not a (single) country, but a lot of our problems, as young Africans, are similar. And Twitter brings the continent together.”