The Nigerian House of Representatives has directed the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to block pornographic sites in the country.
The House wants the Commission to compel on all internet service providers to block all such contents with immediate effect.
An All Progressives Congress (APC), lawmaker from Katsina State, Dalhatu Tafoki, sponsored the motion.
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Moving the motion leading to the passing of the resolution, Tafoki argued that cyber pornography was becoming a global problem, adding that Nigeria had not taken adequate steps to address it.
According to him, Nigeria is a “highly religious country” where major faiths preach against and prohibit nudity and obscenity.
The lawmaker went further to state that several countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East had enacted laws banning pornography.
To drive home his point, the Katsina lawmaker made reference to warnings from psychologists and sociologists about the negative impact of pornography.
According to him, pornography could lead to adultery, prostitution and addiction.
“Renowned psychologists and sociologists around the world have issued stern warnings on the psychological, sociological and mental consequences of viewing pornographic content,” he said.
Tajudeen Abbas, the Speaker of the House of Representatives subjected the motion to a voice vote where the lawmakers voted in support of it.
The House directed the NCC to impose penalties on service providers that fail to comply with the directive.
Most visited pornographic sites in Nigeria
Semrush, a leading American SEO platform, recently reported that Nigerians mostly visited pornography and betting websites in June.
It said Nigerians visited the websites over 185 million times, just as DataReportal, which provides data and insights, reported that Nigeria has 103.0 million internet users, representing a 45.5 per cent internet penetration rate.
This means that almost half of the population in Nigeria has access to the internet, contributing to the high number of visits to these websites.
Semrush calculated the data using petabytes of anonymised clickstream data collected from millions of real user journeys, then cleaned and processed it through AI algorithms.
The data identified Xvideo.com, Xnxx.com and pornhub.com as the most popular pornographic websites visited by Nigerians.
Xvideo.com was visited 52.82 million times, Xnxx.com 28.41 million times, and Pornhub.com 10.2 million times, resulting in over 91.43 million visits to pornographic websites by Nigerians in June.
The top ten rankings showed that Nigerians visited betting and pornographic websites more than news, Bitcoin and trading sites. This indicates a significant preference for entertainment and leisure activities over other online content.
