Former US president Donald Trump has praised Nigeria’s government for banning Twitter after it deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s post for breaching its rules,
BBC reports.
“Who are they to dictate good and evil, if they themselves are evil?” Mr Trump said in a statement.
He urged other countries to ban Twitter and Facebook for not allowing “free and open speech.”
Mr Trump was banned from both platforms after the US Capitol riot in January.
His posts before and after the raid were alleged to have encouraged violence.
While Twitter made its ban permanent, Facebook announced last week that its suspension, including of the former president's Instagram account, would last at least two years.
“Congratulations to the country of Nigeria, who just banned Twitter because they banned their president,” he said in a statement released on Tuesday.
He suggested that he should have banned Facebook while he was in office, but said the company's boss Mark Zuckerberg “kept calling me and coming to the White House for dinner telling me how great I was.”
Mr Trump also backed unnamed rival social media platforms, saying they “will emerge and take hold.”
The authorities in Nigeria accused the platform of threatening the country's "corporate existence" by allowing "misinformation and fake news to spread."
The ban followed the removal of President Buhari's tweet, which referred to Nigeria's civil war four decades ago, and included a veiled threat towards those backing a secessionist movement in the south-east of the country.
