Nigeria requested Google to dam using YouTube channels and livestreams by banned teams and terrorist organisations within the nation, Information Minister Lai Mohammed stated on Thursday.

Nigeria has been exploring methods to control social media utilization within the nation, Africa’s most populous. The nation is dwelling to thousands and thousands of Internet customers and platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok are in style.

YouTube “channels and emails containing names of banned groups and their affiliates should not be allowed on Google platforms,” Mohammed stated he informed 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 handle the Nigerian authorities’s considerations.

Those measures embrace a system for educated customers to flag troublesome content material, he added. “We share the same goals and objectives,” Murito stated. “We do not want our platform to be used for ill purposes.”

The minister stated the federal government was significantly involved with on-line actions by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The authorities has labeled IPOB, a bunch campaigning for the secession of a southeastern area of Nigeria, a “terrorist organization.”

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 12 months.

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

The authorities lifted the Twitter ban six months later.

© Thomson Reuters 2022