3 Months Imprisonment For Social Media Offenders Passes Senate’s First Reading

Senate reintroduces bill to regulate social media — with 3 years
imprisonment for ‘offenders’.

A bill seeking to regulate social media in the country has
passed first reading at the senate.

The bill entitled, ‘protection from internet falsehood and
manipulations bill, 2019’ is sponsored by Mohammed Sani Musa,
senator representing Niger east.

The proposed legislation was one of the 11 bills read for the
first time on Tuesday.

Speaking with journalists in Abuja, the sponsor of the bill said
Nigeria needs the legislation because it would protect its “fragile
unity”.

“There has never been a time when Nigeria has been very fragile
in terms of its unity than this period,” Musa said.

“It is not to stop people from going into the internet to do
whatever they feel legitimate is okay to do but what we felt is
wrong is for you to use the medium to document information that you
know is false, just because you want to achieve your desirable
interest.”

He said the bill proposes a punishment of N150,000 fine or three
years imprisonment for any offender.

“If it is a corporate organisation that refused to block that
false information despite the fact that they have been alerted by
authorities not to disseminate that information for public interest
and they still go ahead and do it, refusing to do that blockage
will be penalised between N5 million to N10 million for those
organisations,” the senator said.

“For example, MTN, Glo, 9 mobile etc. which we use their
platform in transmitting these information, if nothing is done, we
fine them and you will see that it will be a deterrent to
others.”

In the previous senate, there was a similar bill sponsored by
Bala Na’Allah, then deputy majority leader.

But the bill was withdrawn after outrage by some Nigerians.

Recently, Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture,
said the federal government was working on sanitising the social
media.