Tue, Aug 09, 2022 page5

• Kenya campaign ends, but disinformation drags on

  • AFP, NAIROBI
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  The campaign for Kenya’s presidential election has officially closed, but the relentless — and dangerous — flow of disinformation continues online, as keyboard warriors battle to discredit rivals by sharing fake rigging claims, experts say.

  Campaigners for the frontrunners, Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto and veteran politician Raila Odinga, are circulating dozens of posts claiming that their opponent is engaged in “vote rigging plots,” said Benedict Manzin, a sub-Sahara African analyst at UK-based intelligence firm Sibylline.

  “We are increasingly seeing false information which seeks to delegitimize the results of the election with widespread claims that the opposing side would only win through fraud and that they are attempting to steal the election,” Manzin said.

  

  People look for their names on the voters’ roll near a polling station ahead of the Kenyan presidential election in the Kawangware area of Nairobi yesterday.

  Photo: AFP

  In one case, a strategist for Ruto’s campaign accused Odinga’s team of trying to rig today’s poll because the 77-year-old urged the election commission to use a manual voter register instead of a digital one.

  Meanwhile a pro-Odinga blogger wrote on Twitter that Ruto was attempting to steal the election, sharing a link to an unrelated video — since taken down — of a politician discussing an old scandal.

  Mary Blankenship, a disinformation researcher at the University of Nevada, said the circulation of baseless fraud claims could cause real harm, especially in a country where past polls have been followed by an eruption of violence.

  “It creates an avenue for either of the candidates to discredit the outcome of the polls, which could lead to unrest,” Blankenship said.

  She likened the situation to the 2020 US election when former US president Donald Trump’s fraud claims culminated in an attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

  More than 1,100 people died in politically motivated inter-ethnic clashes in Kenya following the bitterly disputed 2007 elections.

  A decade later, dozens died during a police crackdown on protests after the 2017 presidential poll which was later annulled by the US Supreme Court due to “irregularities and illegalities.”

  Fact-checking groups have debunked hundreds of false and misleading claims about the Kenyan elections.

  Both sides have sought to cast aspersions on their opponent’s educational qualifications, claiming that Odinga lied about studying engineering in Germany and that Ruto falsified his university grades. These claims were debunked by fact-checkers, but trended on Twitter for days.

  Mainstream media organizations have also been dragged into the fray, with impostor Web sites and social media pages mimicking genuine outlets used to spread falsehoods about candidates.

  “We are constantly having to issue alerts to say this did not originate from our company,” Citizen TV editor Waihiga Mwaura said.

  Fraudulent opinion polls have emerged as a major trend, with campaigners falsely attributing them to legitimate sources such as survey company GeoPoll and the Daily Nation newspaper.

  There are “efforts to make different leaders look even more popular than they are, to create the impression they are winning the elections,” said Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist with the University of Birmingham.

  “The main misinformation and disinformation we have seen in 2022 is quite similar to the 2017 elections,” Cheeseman said, referring to “negative ethnic stereotyping” among other tactics.

  An undercover expose by UK media revealed that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to target political ads — including some that preyed on ethnic fears — during Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s successful campaigns in 2013 and 2017.

  Kenyan civil society groups and a state watchdog have warned that the barrage of disinformation poses a risk to democracy and called on social media platforms to act.

  The authorities have also set up a special division to handle “election and hate speech-related offences.”

  “Part of what this misinformation and disinformation does is that it plays into the stereotypes, preconceived notions and the emotional aspect of voters,” said Mark Kaigwa, team leader at StopReflectVerify.com, a Kenyan organization analyzing disinformation. “It is a way to energize people and rally them emotionally.”

  While platforms such as Facebook and TikTok say they are committed to rooting out disinformation and hate speech, observers are skeptical, not least because election influencers rely on code words to amplify their messages.

  “There is a lot of coded language ... being used to mask or ensure that these social media platforms don’t identify such type of hate speech,” said Allan Cheboi, a senior investigator at Code for Africa, a data journalism and civic technology initiative.

  For instance, some campaigners use the Swahili word madoadoa (“blemish”) to attack members of various communities in Kenya, Cheboi said.

  “Incitement starts online then results [in] violence in offline spaces,” he said.
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