How the Social Media Bill Could Affect Nigerian ISPs
There were fears that the Nigerian government would shut down the internet during the 2019 presidential elections. In prior months, citizens of Gambia, Benin Republic, Sudan, DR Congo, and Egypt had all experienced large scale disruptions to internet services during key elections, political referenda, or anti-government protests. The concern was, therefore, that the Nigerian government would take a page out of their neighbours’ playbook.
There’s arguably no sector that felt that fear more acutely than local media. Some media companies even began to make contingency plans, searching for ways to circumvent a possible internet blackout. Thankfully, those fears never materialized and the media was able to report on the elections as they had planned, while internet service providers were spared the anguish of being caught in the middle of an ideological battle between government control and civic freedoms.
But ISPs won’t be able to escape this battle forever. In November 2019, a bill that could fundamentally change the way internet services are provided in the country passed second reading at the senate. It is called the “Protection from Internet Falsehood and Manipulation Bill 2019 (SB 132)” and it’s a near carbon copy of a bill that was passed into law in Singapore in October 2019.
The aim of the Nigerian bill is to control the circulation of false statements on social media and on the internet. The bill empowers the police and other law enforcement agencies to order the removal or correction of “fake news” published online. It also empowers the NCC to issue orders to ISPs to block access to certain sites and/or individual accounts.
The “Internet Falsehood and Manipulation Bill” is often conflated with the “National Commission for the Prohibition of Hate Speech”. While both bills will affect the way Nigerians interact with social media and the internet, the Internet Falsehood bill may also force ISPs to rethink the way they provide access to the internet. The bill in its current form proposes penalties not only for internet users but also for service providers. ISPs found to be complicit in the spread of “fake news” could be fined between ₦1 million and ₦10 million per infraction.
There’s practically no social media service that has its server and storage infrastructure located inside Nigeria. As a result, targeted actions such as pulling down user accounts and blocking specific user content like ads, tweets, and Facebook posts, might be out of the reach of the Nigerian government for now.
However, there are a number of workarounds. For instance, the Singaporean government created an official government fact-checking website, where “fake news” is posted and perpetrators are named, shamed and asked to issue public apologies. And in India, ISPs routinely block specific Twitter handles on government request, they’ve gone as far as blocking parody accounts of government officials.
In contrast to social media services, ISPs locate their infrastructure within the country; they are, therefore, beholden to local laws. And up to this point, regulations on the Nigerian internet have largely been targeted at cybercrime, not the circulation of “fake news”. Last year, Freedom of the Net assessed the Nigerian internet to be “partly free”, which isn’t great news but it could frankly be worse.
However, the report also warned that Nigeria, alongside Kenya and Egypt, is a country where internet freedoms are in sharp decline. It surmised that the NCC allegedly requesting ISPs to block 21 news sites for carrying pro-Biafra messages in 2017 was a worrying sign of things to come. The proposed Internet Falsehood bill could, therefore, be an early manifestation; in the future, such blocks could be longer, more frequent and more brazen.
According to the bill, the Nigerian government could mandate ISPs to disable internet access to an individual or a location where a false statement has been published. Under these new guidelines, investigating and punishing registered customers or verified social media accounts could be a straightforward process; the assumption being that the ISP would have a deep business relationship with its customers or that the user’s social media capital or internet footprint is large enough for their online activities to be tracked.
However, for the vast majority of internet users, there’s a gap between online identities and real-life identities that will complicate the task of investigation and control. Bridging that gap may be the biggest challenge the Internet Falsehood bill will face in its implementation. Nigerian ISPs do not currently possess the type of Great Wall of China-grade sophistication that would allow for fine-grained restrictions. The government could, therefore, find bulk controls more effective than targeted blocking.
Nigerian ISPs may then be required to do more traffic filtering closer to the source rather than at the user level. They may employ broader, blunter parameters such as IP addresses, URLs, DNS, and even base station locations; methods that all have the potential for large collateral damage. Enforcing these controls could be the networking equivalent of using a can of insecticide to kill one troublesome mosquito.
It’s, therefore, not implausible that the radius of the government’s internet controls could start out small but grow so large as to validate the concerns about censorship and state-sponsored surveillance. Nigeria may then join a league of countries that includes Egypt, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela, where stopping the dissemination of “fake news” opened Pandora’s box for additional internet controls.
The Nigerian Internet Falsehood bill could also present an interesting conundrum for the NCC. The commission has been a champion of net neutrality; in 2017 it issued a draft of its “Internet Industry Code of Practice in Support of Net Neutrality” and took a stand against corporate censorship. However, if the Internet Falsehood bill gets passed into law, the NCC could transform into the primary enforcers of censorship of a possibly equally worrisome kind, while local ISPs could become its agents.
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