Nigeria’s Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, said on Friday that he was not sure whether Facebook, Twitter, Google and other new media multinationals that make millions of dollars from Nigeria pay taxes.

Asked by SimonAtebaNews whether Facebook and others pay taxes, Saraki said he was not sure but will look into it.

Saraki answered questions at the social media week event taking place in Lagos.

About 7.2 million Nigerians go to Facebook daily out of 16 million who have Facebook accounts, the social network said on Thursday.

At the “social media week” event holding in Nigeria’s most populous city of Lagos, a representative of Facebook in Africa said an average user in Nigeria spends about seven hours on Facebook every day, typing text, uploading pictures, videos or simply reading or watching what others post.

Nigeria has a population of about 170 million people and with 16 million Facebook subscribers, that means about ten percent of Nigerians now have Facebook accounts, although less than half of them go there daily.

Facebook said it makes money from Nigeria, probably millions of dollars, but did not disclose the amount. It was not clear if the company pays taxes to the government from the money generated in Nigeria.

Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, advertise on Facebook to boost posts or pages but it is not clear how much is generated from adverts.

There were some revelations made by Facebook representative on why content sometimes is not seen by users. Only about 20 percent of Facebook content is displayed on the timeline, he said.

He said Facebook algorithm chooses what to display to someone’s timeline based on their past, consistent behaviours.

In other words, Facebook only displays content it feels will interest users, leaving billions of contents out of the public view except when paid for.

This, a participant at the event noted, means that Facebook deliberately doesn’t display content it feels won’t be interesting to readers, even when in reality it is.