Nigerian Woman Faces Jail Time For Facebook Review of Tomato Sauce

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Nigeria doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to respecting the speech rights of its own citizens, nor the rights of platforms that its citizens use. But I will admit that even with that reputation in place, I’m a bit at a loss as to why the country decided to arrest and charge a woman for violating those same laws because she wrote an unkind review of a can of tomato puree on Facebook: “A Nigerian woman who wrote an online review of a can of tomato puree is facing imprisonment after its manufacturer accused her of making a ‘malicious allegation’ that damaged its business. Chioma Okoli, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from Lagos, is being prosecuted and sued in civil court for allegedly breaching the country’s cybercrime laws, in a case that has gripped the West African nation and sparked protests by locals who believe she is being persecuted for exercising her right to free speech.”

By now you’re wondering what actually happened here. Well, Okoli got on Facebook after having tried a can of Nagiko Tomato Mix, made by local Nigerian company Erisco Foods. Her initial post essentially complained about it being too sugary. So pretty standard fair for a review-type post on Facebook. When she started getting some mixed replies, some of them told her to stop trying to ruin the company and just buy something else, with one such message supposedly coming from a relative of the company’s ownership. To that, she replied: “Okoli responded: ‘Help me advise your brother to stop ki***ing people with his product, yesterday was my first time of using and it’s pure sugar.'”

By the way, you can see all of this laid out by Erisco Foods itself on its own Facebook page. The company also claims that she exchanged messages with others talking about how she wanted to trash the product online so that nobody would buy it and that sort of thing. Whatever the truth about that situation is, this all stems from a poor review of a product posted online, which is the kind of speech countries with free speech laws typically protect. In Okoli’s case, she was arrested shortly after those posts. […] Okoli is pregnant and was placed in a cell during her arrest that had water leaking into it, by her account. She was also forced to apologize to Erisco Foods as part of her bond release, which she then publicly stated was done under duress and refused to apologize once out of holding. Okoli is also countersuing both Erisco Foods and the police, arguing for a violation of her speech rights.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.