Nigerians Shift To VPN As FG Suspends Twitter

Nigerians have opted for the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to continue their online activities following the suspension of Twitter by the Federal Government.

Naija News reports that the Federal Government on Friday suspended indefinitely, the operations of the microblogging and social networking service in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, announced the suspension in a statement signed by his media aide Segun Adeyemi.

The minister cited the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.

He also directed the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to immediately commence the process of licensing all OTT and social media operations in Nigeria.

This platform understands that this development is coming after Twitter had on Wednesday deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweet for violating its rules.

However, on Saturday morning, it was gathered that some Nigerian Twitter users have started exploring possible options to keep their communication flow on the social media platform afloat.

Naija News understands that some Nigerians have been able to resume their normal Twitter activities through the help of VPN.

A VPN extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.

Applications running across a VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network.

It provides access to resources that may be inaccessible on the public network, and is typically used for telecommunications workers.

A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated circuits or with tunneling protocols over existing networks.

A VPN available from the public Internet can provide some of the benefits of a wide area network (WAN). From a user perspective, the resources available within the private network can be accessed remotely.