Social Media Platforms Driving Kenya’s Fake News Cycle

Some time in May, looking back on her failed presidential election campaign, former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton took full responsibility for every political decision she made, but “that’s not why I lost” said former US Secretary of State. Instead she goes on to say that she was subjected to an unprecedented campaign of fake news and social engineering on Facebook, orchestrated by Russian agents and an army of bots.

Now happening closer to home, Africa – Kenya, social media networks like Facebook and WhatsApp are being used to spread fake news stories—less than three weeks before the country holds a tightly-contested general election. The prevalence and impact of fake news are also becoming a question of concern for political campaigners, journalists, government officials, and companies like Google. In the past, false stories were used to peddle narratives about the death of showbiz celebrities, the import of plastic rice into Kenya, the dangers of certain online games, or the appearance of Barack Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.

But observers now say there’s a concerted attempt at spreading misinformation and to perhaps sway public opinion. As the campaigns have gotten underway, there has been an increase in the number of attack ads appearing online, besides the manufacturing of falsehoods disguised as news material. Some users on Kenya’s social media networks have also blamed some of the misinformation on Cambridge Analytica, a company at the center of a growing controversy over the use of data mining and psychological profiling to influence both the Brexit vote in the UK and the Donald Trump election in the US. “It seems as if there’s a drive, a deliberate effort to create fake stories,” Catherine Gicheru, the Kenya head for the data journalism and civic technology initiative, Code for Africa, said.

Deliberate spreading of false information is now a core part of the news mix in Kenya, according to a study which revealed 90% of Kenyans had heard or seen false stories related to the election, with a cross section of the population including official groups, friends, and families all using social media to spread misinformation. The study, by Portland and GeoPoll, had asked a sample of 2,000 Kenyans about their consumption of news related to the upcoming polls