Presidency deny Buhari’s daughter’s alleged Twitter comments

The attention of the Presidency has been drawn to unauthorized and unexpected Tweets by an account falsely linked to Zahra Buhari, one of the daughters of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Following enquiries by a few foreign missions on the raging online controversy about unsavory comments against some foreign leaders purportedly made by her, we wish to state categorically that Zahra is indeed on Twitter but the offending handle @Zahra_Buhari has stopped being her own for a long time since it was compromised by hackers.

Tweets by this handle are therefore not her own and should be disregarded and considered as the work of hackers seeking to cause mischief between this country and other friendly states.

Zahra’s authentic handle is @ZmBuhari and any handle other than this on Twitter should be considered as fake and therefore fraudulent.

It also pertinent to state at this point that neither the wife of the President, Mrs. Aisha Buhari nor the other children are presently on Twitter, Facebook or the various other platforms.

As they the explore the possibilities on this new territory, we request the general public to ignore the many accounts on various platforms in their names that currently exist. Such accounts, beside the authentic one cited above in the name of Zahra are unauthorized and therefore fake.

Garba Shehu

SSA (Media and Publicity)

State House

Abuja

Presidency deny Buhari’s daughter’s alleged Twitter comments

Twitter moves to stem violent threats, abuse

Twitter on Tuesday began implementing a new policy aimed at curbing use of the social network to incite violence, and to crack down on abuse and harassment on the service. The new rules are the latest implemented by social networks aiming to stem violence and harassment while attempting to safeguard freedom of online speech. “We need to ensure that voices are not silenced because people are afraid to speak up,” said Twitter’s head of product management Shreyas Doshi in a blog post.

“To that end, we are today announcing our latest product and policy updates that will help us in continuing to develop a platform on which users can safely engage with the world at large.” Some of the changes were outlined last week in a Washington Post column by Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde.

On Tuesday, Doshi noted that Twitter had updated its  policy on violent threats “so that the prohibition is not limited to ‘direct, specific threats of violence against others’ but now extends to ‘threats of violence against others or promot(ing) violence against others.”

He said the previous policy “was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior.” Twitter’s new policy also allows the social network to “lock” abusive accounts for specific periods of time, which could help crack down on so-called cyberbullying and spam. “This option gives us leverage in a variety of contexts, particularly where multiple users begin harassing a particular person or group of people,” Doshi said.

Doshi also noted that Twitter would be testing “a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach.” The new tool, which was not described in detail, could help Twitter identify abusive activity by looking at “a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive,” said Doshi.

This tool “will not affect your ability to see content that you’ve explicitly sought out, such as tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content,” he noted. Twitter’s actions follow initiatives by Facebook as well as Facebook-owned Instagram that aim to crack down on abusive conduct and use of the platforms to promote violence.

Social networks have been struggling with defining acceptable content and freedom of expression, and radical extremism and violence increasingly linked to these services. Facebook said last month it will not allow the social network to be used to promote terrorism or hate speech as it unveiled a wide-ranging update of its “community standards.”

 

Twitter moves to stem violent threats, abuse

‘Jonathan is not on twitter, has the second largest followership on facebook’

A presidential source has disclosed that President Goodluck Jonathan is not on twitter contrary to an earlier report by an online news site that claimed that the president operates the @JGoodlucktweets account.

But upon investigation, it was revealed that the Twitter profile in question @JGoodlucktweets though pro-Jonathan, is not the twitter profile of the President neither is it listed on any of the President’s official platforms.

“The president is not on twitter, he does not operate any account like that. His facebook account is verified where he engage Nigerians and the world. In fact, one of his aides granted an interview to a national daily in 2013 explaining why the President is not on Twitter,” the source said.

President Jonathan is verified on Facebook where he has a following of almost 2 million followers. He has the second largest following of any President after US President, Barrack Obama and he regularly engages with Nigerians through that medium.

The @JGoodlucktweets was last updated on November 11 while the verified facebook account boast of the president’s Christmas message on December 25.

 

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‘Jonathan is not on twitter, has the second largest followership on facebook’