Nairaland is a Nigerian English-languageinternet forum. Founded by Nigerian entrepreneur Seun Osewa on March 8, 2005, it is targeted primarily at Nigerian domestic residents and is the 6th most visited website in Nigeria.[1]
It currently has over 3.0 million registered users with over 7.4 million topics created to date, and it is estimated that approximately 3% of Nigerian Internet users are registered on Nairaland, compared to Facebook's 11 million Nigerian users, which corresponds to approximately 20% of the local Internet population.[2] Registration is only necessary for posting, commenting or liking posts.
Incidents
2014 4chan prank
During the Ebola virus epidemic, trolls from 4chan registered on Nairaland in 2014 to propagate false claims that Americans and Europeans were spreading the Ebola virus in magical rituals through worship of 4chan's "Ebola-chan" meme (an anime personification of the Ebola virus).[3]
2014 down period
On June 22, 2014, following a successful hacking attempt, Nairaland went offline briefly.[4] The hackers were able to gain access to, and wipe the contents of, the website's host server and backup. Three days later, it was back online after some data had been recovered from a remote backup. However, user posts and registration between January 10, 2014, and June 22, 2014, was lost. Users with lost accounts were required to re-register.[5]
QAnon conspiracy theory
In August 2020, The Daily Beast reported that some users on Nairaland were promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.[6]
Ethnic Bigotry
Nairaland has faced criticism for hosting content and fostering communities promoting ethnic bigotry. Although the platform has implemented policies against hate speech and discrimination, concerns remain about the prevalence of ethnic slurs, stereotypes, and inflammatory rhetoric targeting various Nigerian ethnic groups. This has led to the erosion of members from Nairaland to other social networks like Facebook, Nelogram and Twitter that have strict rules against abuse and hate speech.[7]
2023 Site host shutdown
Unannounced to the public, Nairaland site was shut down on the 18th of December, 2023 by the site host. The founder of the micro-blogging site, Nairaland.com, Seun Osewa, said the site is experiencing a downtime after it was "taken down" by the host of its server.
Users of the site on Monday night, had raised the alarm of being shut out, raising concerns of possible hacking.
A check on the platform showed several error messages indicating a problem with the server, a situation Osewa acknowledged was punishment for overlooking an earlier sent abuse report.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday morning, the founder explained that though the said offensive content had been removed, the server user interface was still experiencing a delay.
Osewa posted, "Nairaland’s server was taken down because I overlooked an abuse report that was originally sent on the 14th. After the takedown, I removed the offensive content"[8]
Notes
^Nairaland can be viewed without an account but registration is required to post, comment or like.
