What I have uncovered is how the production of disinformation became a cottage industry in Kenya, how disinformation can be used as a tool to consolidate power, and how European far-right groups have tried to manipulate Kenyan platforms.
As I waded through all this content, I would always find several TikTok videos being distributed across platforms. So I decided to focus on TikTok to try to get a sense of the world where these videos were originating.
TikTok likes to position itself as a dancing and lip-syncing app, but my investigation unearthed a lot more than that. There were brazen calls for ethnic hatred and violence. One video contained a clip of a political candidate giving a speech at a rally with a caption saying that he hates "Kikuyus [an ethnic tribe in Kenya] and will be seeking revenge in 2022." Another took on the form of a detergent infomercial, saying that "UDA [a Kenyan political party] can be used to remove madoadoa ["stains"] such as Kikuyus, Luhyas, Luos and even Kambas." (All these are tribes in Kenya.) I also encountered phoney content: slickly produced videos containing fake assertions, styled as if they're from authentic Netflix documentaries, local TV stations or even US president Joe Biden's Twitter account.
Denne historien er fra July 08, 2022-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra July 08, 2022-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Finn family murals
The optimism that runs through Finnish artist Tove Jansson's Moomin stories also appears in her public works, now on show in a Helsinki exhibition
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