BREAKING: Twitter deletes Buhari’s ‘genocidal tweet’, may ban Nigerian president

Twitter has deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweet threatening genocide against the people of Igbo-dominated South-East.

In the tweet shared on Tuesday, Buhari spoke about the civil war experience and threatened to deal with those “bent on destroying” Nigeria through “insurrection.”

“Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand,” he had said.

But Twitter deleted the message on Wednesday, following widespread condemnation of the tweet.

The platform said the post violated its rules.

The social media giant deleted Mr Buhari’s tweet following enquiries from Nigerians with the context in which the Nigerian leader issued the threat on Tuesday night.

The Nigerian leader may also be locked out of his account for 24 hours or face a temporary suspension for the offensive tweet, The Gazette learnt.

Earlier, Twitter had seen no wrongdoing in its response to some of those who marked the tweet as genocidal and reported it as a violation of its policy.

But following an enquiry in which Nigerians detailed how the tweet was essentially similar to the one posted by the Chinese Embassy in Washington which Twitter deleted in January and marked as dehumanisation of a protect ethnic group of Uighur, the social media giant backtracked, striking down the tweet of the Nigerian president.

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Mr Buhari’s tweet boasted about the role he played alongside other Nigerian military officers in the Nigerian Civil War of 1966-70, during which over three million Igbo civilians were killed, many of them rounded up and shot at close range or starved to death.

The president’s tweet followed widespread attacks on public facilities by unknown attackers in the region, but critics said his comments were an escalation of violence and a promotion of genocide rather than an attempt to curb the excesses of criminals rampaging across the South-East.

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