NewsPlots To Regulate Social Media Will Kill Free Speech, HURIWA Warns FG

Plots To Regulate Social Media Will Kill Free Speech, HURIWA Warns FG

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BEVERLY HILLS, November 04, (THEWILL) – Foremost civil Rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA has warned the federal government to desist from its sinister plots to undermine freedom of speech under the guise of regulating the social media.

HURIWA in a statement Monday also called for the immediate release of the publisher of Sahara Reporters and the political activist, Mr. Omoyele Sowore and his supporters being detained by the state.

The group said the continuous detention of these journalists and activists and their illegal persecution paints Nigeria graphically as a banana republic and a laughing stock of the World.

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“It is shameful that the government can lock up activists and journalists only for expressing dissenting views and the President still globetrots in the name of a civilian President of a constitutional democracy. This is a joke taken too far. These Nigerians should be freed and allowed to freely express their opinions within the bounds of the law as provided for under the relevant provisions that protect Free Speech. Now the media practitioners and activists face deadly threats from the Central government and their intolerant and primitive supporters,” the group said in the statement.

It said the series of media campaigns of calumny and persistent demonization of the social media by Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the information minister who is hiding under the nebulous pursuit of defending the so-called national security interests of Nigeria, is clearly undemocratic and nothing short of an act of active coup attempt to whittle down the unfettered enjoyment of the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental freedom of citizens.

HURIWA wonders why the minister is being allowed to waste public resources and time waging a war against free speech and the social media when it is clear that the nation already has more than enough legal frameworks regulating the use of social media including the Cyber Crimes Prevention Act, which was signed into law in 2015.

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