By Leo Han and Krish Ganotra - Lab Undergraduate Affiliates
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” That the phrase highlights the notable influence of words and their potential power to change the world for the better. However, that same power can make words a far more violent and cruel weapon than a sword. In the case of misinformation, words can damage a countless number of lives and the roots of democracy when wielded maliciously. Kenya has recently fallen victim to a number of disinformation attacks that have manipulated the society and the politics and led to the deaths of thousands of innocent lives.
The presidential election of 2007 was one of the worst catastrophes in Kenyan history, exacerbated by the spread of disinformation. The two rival candidates were Kibaki representing the Party of National Unity and Odinga representing the Orange Democratic Movement. Prior to election day, several forged documents were leaked online that claimed Odinga was aiming to turn Kenya into a Sharia state, resulting in Odinga losing support from the Christian community. Shortly after the electoral commissioner declared Kibaki as the new President, the commissioner mentioned that he was under pressure to announce the result and could not be certain that Kibaki had won. Following the announcement of the results, supporters of both parties violently clashed out in the streets. People were armed with matchetes and youth gangs were torching homes and churches. Kenyan police were unable to halt the disorder and numerous pictures depict the mass murders, sexual abuse, and looting. Casualties were estimated to be between 1,400 people killed and 600,000 people were displaced from their homes.
To quell the violence, Kibaki and Odinga instituted constitutional reforms in 2008. The reforms included Odinga becoming Prime Minister, the revival of bicameral parliament, an enhanced Bill of Rights, the creation of the Supreme Court, the reduction of presidential authority, and the centralization of the government based on counties. County governor elections began in 2013.
On August 8th, 2017, another presidential election was completed. Uhuru Kenyatta was announced as the winner, but his main opponent, Odinga, stated that Kenyatta had rigged the election and requested the Supreme Court to nullify the election result. Weeks later, the Supreme Court had accepted Odinga’s request and another election was held in October 2017, though Kenyatta was still announced to be the winner of the re-election. After Kenyatta had been elected president, there have been multiple reports that the election was heavily marred by fake news. It is well documented that Cambridge Analytica, a foreign company, intervened the election, allegedly acquiring Kenyan citizens’ social media data and linkingthem with their voter registration information to target attack ads and misinformation without consent. The managing director of the company was filmed boasting that they had a hand in “just about every element” of Kenyatta’s presidential campaign. The effects of this disinformation campaign and others impacted the majority of Kenyan voters. A Geopoll survey conducted in May 2017, three months before the election, found that 90% of Kenyans surveyed suspected having seen or heard false/inaccurate information regarding the election, with 87% reporting having seen information that they suspected was deliberately false (fake news). The spread of misinformation had vastly increased in recent years due to the spread of social media. Those intending to spread disinformation, such as Cambridge Analytics, deployed various methods to garner the attention of as many people as possible on social media. One method, the use of bots, according to a Portland 2018 study How Africa Tweets, found that bots accounted for 26% of all influential voices during the 2017 elections in Kenya. These strategies are not only employed by foreign companies, but also by domestic political parties. The period prior to the 2017 election showed an uptick in the number of fake news creators working for Kenyan political parties. Disinformation targeted at Kenyan citizens eroded their trust in democratic institutions. Creators of disinformation were not necessarily trying to convince the public that their content was true, but rather were trying to overwhelm usersand create an environment where basic truth was questioned.
Uhuru Kenyatta won the presidential elections in 2013 and 2017 and William Ruto served as deputy president. While currently, Kenyatta is in his second and final term, he has been trying to pass the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), a constitutional referendum that would allow him to run for a third term. Kenyatta says the BBI is meant to cure the “cyclic post-election violence” that Kenya routinely faces; however, the Judges of the High Court of Kenya rejected the bill and released a scathing statement, “In taking initiatives to amend the constitution other than through the prescribed means in the constitution, the president failed to respect, uphold and safeguard the constitution and, to that extent, he has fallen short of the leadership and integrity threshold.” Following this contentious disagreement between Kenyatta and the judicial branch, the Judges of the High Court of Kenya became victims of a series of coordinated disinformation attacks. These attacks called into question the judges’ integrity and competence with lies and hoaxes. Along with judges, Kenyan journalists and activists who opposed the BBI also fell victim to disinformation attacks. These attacks were highly defamatory and resulted in pressuring targeted persons to self-censor or dedicate significant time to debunking false information.
Further adding to these attacks, social media influencers were hired. They were paid $10 to $15 a day and told what to post, what hashtags to use, which tweets to engage with, and how to synchronize posts to generate trending content. In Kenya, where many citizens earn $1 a day, spreading disinformation is a lucrative business. Operatives communicated these requirements with the influencers using WhatsApp with “the main goal [being] to trend on Twitter.” The "trending” feature on Twitter has been called into question as it has been exploited to spread disinformation. In only the two months following the court’s ruling, there were 31 trending artificial, politically motivated hashtags. A notable feature of these hashtags is the unnatural synchronization: sharp bursts of activity during specific periods of time. Eventually, Twitter removed over 100 accounts in Kenya responsible for spreading defamatory disinformation, but many remain. Moreover, the disinformation propagated by these attacks have taken on a life of their own through a contagion effect. For example, Twitter found many of the tweets with the hashtag #AnarchistJudges to be legitimate. Although this hashtag originated from the coordinated disinformation attacks, once it began trending, the false information had spread to the general public who continued to spread it further.
The upcoming 2022 election portends a likely new wave of disinformation attacks. These attacks will look to exploit the tensions in Kenya to influence the election and decrease trust in the democratic process. Social media, particularly, poses a great challenge. While social media has huge democratizing potential by increasing access to information and greatly lowering the barrier of participation for the common citizen, the last few years have shown equally large threats that the same media poses to the integrity of elections. One proposed solution to this misinformation endemic was the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act passed in Kenya in 2018 that criminalized fake news, with a maximum penalty of USD $50,000 and/or 10 years in jail. This bill caused an uproar because it was perceived to infringe on the freedom of expression and the freedom of media. The act was ultimately suspended in 2020. The balance between countering misinformation and upholding freedom of speech is tricky, but finding a solution is vital for upholding the integrity of the 2022 Kenya election and preventing further violence.
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Project funded by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative - “Exploring the Impact of Human-AI Collaboration on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Investigations of Social Media Disinformation” project.