The marketing campaign for Kenya’s presidential election has formally closed however the relentless — and harmful — flow of disinformation continues on-line, as keyboard warriors battle to discredit rivals by sharing pretend rigging claims, consultants say.
Campaigners for the frontrunners, Deputy President William Ruto and veteran politician Raila Odinga, are circulating dozens of posts claiming that their opponent is engaged in “vote rigging plots”, stated Benedict Manzin, a sub-Saharan Africa analyst at UK-based intelligence agency Sibylline.
“We are increasingly seeing false information which seeks to delegitimise 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 advised AFP.
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Kenya marketing campaign ends however disinformation battle drags on
In one case, a strategist for Ruto’s marketing campaign accused Odinga’s workforce of attempting to rig Tuesday’s ballot as a result of the 77-year-old urged the election fee to make use of a handbook voter register as a substitute of a digital one.
Meanwhile a pro-Odinga blogger tweeted that Ruto was trying to steal the election, sharing a hyperlink to an unrelated video — since taken down — of a politician discussing an outdated scandal.
Mary Blankenship, a disinformation researcher on the University of Nevada, stated the circulation of baseless fraud claims may trigger actual hurt, particularly in a rustic the place previous polls have been adopted 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 advised AFP.
She likened the state of affairs to the 2020 US election when former president Donald Trump’s fraud claims culminated in an assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.
More than 1 100 folks died in politically motivated inter-ethnic clashes in Kenya following the bitterly disputed 2007 elections.
A decade later, dozens died throughout a police crackdown on protests after the 2017 presidential ballot which was later annulled by the Supreme Court as a result of “irregularities and illegalities”.
Fabricated opinion polls
Fact-checking organisations –- together with AFP Fact Check -– have debunked a whole lot of false and deceptive claims concerning the Kenyan elections.
Both sides have sought to forged aspersions on their opponent’s academic {qualifications}, claiming that Odinga lied about learning engineering in Germany and that Ruto falsified his college grades.
These claims had been debunked by fact-checkers however trended on Twitter for days.
Mainstream media organisations have additionally been dragged into the fray, with impostor web sites and social media pages mimicking real retailers used to unfold falsehoods about candidates.
“We are constantly having to issue alerts to say this did not originate from our company,” stated Citizen TV editor Waihiga Mwaura.
Fraudulent opinion polls have emerged as a significant development, with campaigners falsely attributing them to respectable sources such as survey firm 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,” stated 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 advised AFP, referring to “negative ethnic stereotyping” amongst different ways.
An undercover expose by UK media revealed that British consulting agency Cambridge Analytica used the private knowledge of hundreds of thousands of Facebook customers to focus on political adverts — together with some that preyed on ethnic fears — throughout President Uhuru Kenyatta’s profitable campaigns in 2013 and 2017.
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Coded language
Kenyan civil society teams and a state watchdog have warned that the barrage of disinformation poses a danger to democracy and known as on social media platforms to behave.
The authorities have additionally arrange a particular division to deal with “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,” stated Mark Kaigwa, workforce chief at StopReflectVerify.com, a Kenyan organisation analysing disinformation.
“It is a way to energise people and rally them emotionally.”
While platforms like Facebook and TikTok say they’re dedicated to rooting out disinformation and hate speech, observers are sceptical, not least as a result of election influencers depend on codewords 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,”
stated Allan Cheboi, a senior investigator at Code for Africa, an information journalism and civic know-how initiative.
For occasion, some campaigners use the Swahili phrase “madoadoa” (“blemish”) to assault members of varied communities in Kenya, Cheboi advised AFP.
“Incitement starts online then results (in) violence in offline spaces,” he stated.
© Agence France-Presse