Fake news a threat to democracy, says new report

The jury is in. Fake news is a serious danger to Kenya’s young democracy, according to a new report.

The State of the Internet in Kenya 2017, published by the Bloggers Association of Kenya, says last year saw a sharp rise in fake news during electioneering. This might have undemocratically tilted the presidential election in one direction.

First, the report looked at the rise of social media in Kenya.

“The 2017 campaign period saw a spike in media manipulation, over-sensationalised stories, negative campaigning, disinformation and fake news,” the report says.

Social media remains the “dominant source of fake news stories”, according to the report.

Citing figures from Consumer Barometer, the report shows that over 25.6 million Kenyans have access to the Internet. More than 20.8 million of these use a smart phone and a whooping 18.8 million Kenyans access the Internet daily.

As social media expands, bloggers now have tremendous influence. The report says: “2017 demonstrated that bloggers create a vast majority of the local content; be it in form of videos, blog posts, social media sharing and updates, and even journalistic news articles,” the report says.

As of September 2017, the leading social media platform in Kenya is Whatsapp, with 12 million monthly users, says the report. It is followed by Youtube at 8 million, Facebook at 7.1 million and Instagram at 4 million. Twitter and LinkedIn tie at 1 million.

Most fake news is shared on Whatsapp. Kennedy Kachwanya, the Bloggers Association chairperson, explains why:

“Besides being more pervasive than any social network in Kenya, Whatsapp is also fast, simple, and much more intimate, compared to say Facebook or Twitter. These factors rapidly increase a fake news  story’s influential power.”

Second, the report highlighted the biggest possible result of fake news in 2017.

The spotlight is an exposé on Kenya’s last presidential election by Privacy International, a London-based human rights charity.

The exposé reveals how an American digital advertising company, Harris Media LLC, may have tilted the presidential race toward the incumbent, President Kenyatta, by flooding the online space with fake news.

Ahead of the August 2017 election, the report says, paid ads for two mysterious sites dominated Google searches for election-related terms and flooded Kenyans’ social media feeds. These ads piggybacked to either ‘The Real Raila’, a virulent attack campaign alleging that a government headed by Opposition leader Raila Odinga would ‘remove whole tribes’, or to ‘Uhuru for Us’, a softer site showcasing the president’s accomplishments.

The report also highlights the case of global news giants BBC and CNN, which were forced to issue clarifications after falling victim to fake news about the Kenyan election. The BBC’s popular news programme ‘Focus on Africa’ was ridiculed for providing a fake story about the Jubilee Party being ahead by a considerable margin in an opinion poll.

CNN also came out to distance itself from a clip showing President Kenyatta’s popularity surging ahead. The video, which was actually a cut from a CNN Philippines broadcast with the logo of the broadcaster superimposed on the rest of the footage, showed that 59.8 per of Kenyans preferred President Kenyatta to his challenger Raila Odinga.

We don’t know how accurate the Bloggers Association report is. We would recommend more research on the matter.

However, let us put this in perspective.

The report underlines that access to accurate information is a critical facet of a modern democracy, as it enables citizens to make informed choices. Where accurate information is absent or otherwise not guaranteed, it may lead to undue influence on the citizen.

The United States, the world’s only superpower, is shaken to the core by allegations that Russia may have meddled in America’s presidential election. A special prosecutor, an ominous figure that has brought down presidents, is investigating if Russia and not Americans may have thrust President Donald Trump to the White House. The allegation is that Russia did this primarily by flooding the zone with fake news against Trump’s challenger, Hillary Clinton.

If fake news is this dangerous to America, what chance does Kenya’s young democracy have surviving it?