Nairaland is a Nigerian

English-language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

. Founded by Nigerian entrepreneur

Seun Osewa Oluwaseun Temitope Osewa (July 17, 1982) is a Nigerian internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of Nairaland, a popular internet forum launched in March 2005, which was projected as the biggest African forum by ''Forbes''. ''YNaija ''YNaija'' ...

on March 8, 2005, it is targeted primarily at

Nigerian Nigerians or the Nigerian people are citizens of Nigeria or people with ancestry from Nigeria. The name Nigeria was taken from the Niger River running through the country. This name was allegedly coined in the late 19th century by British jour ...

domestic residents and is the 6th most visited website in Nigeria. 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 Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

's 11 million Nigerian users, which corresponds to approximately 20% of the local Internet population. Registration is only necessary for posting, commenting or liking posts.

Incidents

2014 4chan prank

During the

Ebola virus epidemic Ebola, also known as Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), is a viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates, caused by ebolaviruses. Symptoms typically start anywhere between two days and three weeks after becom ...

, users from

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

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 Ebola-chan is an internet meme popularized by 4chan depicting a Moe anthropomorphism, moe anthropomorphization (gijinka) of the Ebola virus. The first known image of Ebola-chan began on the Japanese social media site, Pixiv, in 2014. A few days af ...

" meme (an

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

personification of the Ebola virus).

2014 down period

On June 22, 2014, following a successful hacking attempt, Nairaland went offline briefly. 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.

QAnon conspiracy theory

In August 2020, ''

The Daily Beast ''The Daily Beast'' is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. It was founded in 2008. It has been characterized as a "high-end tabloid" by Noah Shachtman, the site's editor-in-chief from 2018 to 2021. In a 20 ...

'' reported that some users on Nairaland were promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Notes

References

Internet properties established in 2005 Nigerian social networking websites Internet forums {{Nigeria-media-stub