I have been following up some very interesting changes that have been happening to Nigeria’s ruling party official verified twitter account. There have been reports that the said account could have been sold, hacked or even both. Nigeria’s ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC), rose to power in 2015 when their presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, won the presidential election in Nigeria.
The party has been very active on Twitter posting updates from the political party until recently when its Twitter name started undergoing some “metamorphosis” of some sort. First, the account’s display name was changed to “Nigeria Fuck” with the handle remaining as @APCNigeria and thus retaining its verification status. Shortly after cladding its new name, whoever was in control of the account posted that they were selling the account for $10,000 in Bitcoin.
The account was then switched to bear the name and profile photo of Justin Sun and this is where things got interesting. In a series of now deleted tweets, Justin claims that he bought the account from a Nigerian president who needed money. He goes further to state that he paid for the account in cryptocurrency but does not specify the amount and which currency. The escapade does not end there. The twitter account was then switched to bear the name and profile picture of John McAfee, an infamous anti-virus software mogul.
However, at the time of publishing, the account now has no profile picture and the name changed to just “.”, with all the tweets during the period of “sale” having being deleted. What is peculiar and might go unnoticed, is that the location of the account has been changed from San Francisco, to House McAfee and now Hong Kong.
These series of events have made many to speculate that the account was either hacked or actually sold or hacked then sold. APC, through its National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, has denied that the said verified account actually belongs to the party terming the incident as “criminal impersonation”. This is despite the account actually exclusively posting on matters relating to the APC political party.
It is unclear as to why Twitter has not yet taken any action against the account seeing that the account violates the platform’s terms of service that states that a verified account will loose its verification status if it intentionally misleads people on Twitter by changing its display name or bio. APC Nigeria on the other hand, has gone ahead and created new social media accounts, including a new Twitter handle @OfficialAPCNg.
