To what extent will fake news influence next week’s Election?

Fake news victim Funyula MP Paul Otuoma: A fake Daily Nation front page story in April said he had defected from ODM to Jubilee. PHOTO | FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • The Jubilee party, its agents or supporters last week circulated two TV news packages that looked like actual reports from the BBC and CNN projecting a win for President Uhuru Kenyatta.
  • Closer review revealed that the voice-over, lower-third graphics and content were all made up, with overflowing praise for the Kenyan leader.
  • “This report on Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is fake,” CNN International PR tweeted. “CNN did not produce or broadcast this story.”
  • The piece had claimed that the president was still ahead of Raila Odinga, despite having skipped the presidential debate.

Of all the factors that should influence the General Election next week, the cost of living, corruption, tribalism, the economy or even unemployment, the biggest has been hiding in plain sight all this time. “Fake news” wasn’t even a mainstream term despite having first emerged near the end of the 19th century, until Donald Trump made it famous by using it to dismiss any reporting he didn’t like in the American presidential campaign.

The real fake news (a solid oxymoron if ever there was one) has now hit closer home, with the Jubilee and NASA campaigns seemingly outdoing each other in manufacturing falsehoods, amplifying them, or failing to stop their spread. Like a wise man once said, never let facts get in the way of a good story.

I spoke to a journalist friend working on a governor’s re-election campaign in the North Rift who took great pride in the lies he had planted about their opponent. Because of his background in the newsroom, he knows exactly what angles to push for maximum believability and the effect so far has been remarkable.

FAKE 'DAILY NATION' COVER

It is exactly like Paul Otuoma discovered in April when fake copies of the Daily Nation front page in circulation purported to report his defection from ODM to Jubilee. How much those leaflets contributed to his loss in the primary is anyone’s guess.

Nowhere has the fake news outbreak been more devastating than at the national level in the presidential race.

The Jubilee party, its agents or supporters last week circulated two TV news packages that looked like actual reports from the BBC and CNN projecting a win for President Uhuru Kenyatta. Closer review revealed that the voice-over, lower-third graphics and content were all made up, with overflowing praise for the Kenyan leader.

“This report on Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is fake,” CNN International PR tweeted. “CNN did not produce or broadcast this story.”

The piece had claimed that the president was still ahead of Raila Odinga, despite having skipped the presidential debate.

“The BBC is aware of a fake video circulating on WhatsApp about the #Kenya Election. This is NOT a BBC story, the British broadcaster tweeted. “Don’t fall for #fakenews!”

CONVEYOR BELT FOR FAKE NEWS

An astonishing 90 per cent of Kenyans have heard or seen false news in this campaign season.

“It is relatively clear, then, that false and inaccurate news is a part of life in Kenya, particularly surrounding elections,” Portland and GeoPoll said of their study.

“And this is only likely to increase as social media continues to act as a key source of information, with limited checks and balances in place.”

The biggest social network in Kenya, and the biggest conveyor belt for fake news, is WhatsApp, with its users preferred disclaimer, “Sent As Received”.

Even employees of media houses are falling for these forwards as both the phony BBC and CNN pieces ended up on the NTV WhatsApp group.

I always recommend a healthy sense of scepticism,” I told an audience a the New Media Conference in Lagos, Nigeria, where I spoke on Thursday. “In God we trust, for everyone else we verify.”

NASA presidential candidate Raila Odinga famously fell for fake news himself when an aide convinced him that the Kenya Wildlife Service had summoned Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho to explain his use of the nickname, SIMBA 001.

FALSE NARRATIVE

His supporters also pushed a false narrative that an employee of Uchumi Supermarkets had been fired after she served the Opposition leader. Or that other time they claimed he had been poisoned because he was briefly admitted to hospital for suspected food poisoning.

But Jubilee’s side appears to be working overtime in the dark arts of misleading the public. In the last few days, they have faked a NASA coalition document, a bank transfer from Jimi Wanjigi to pay for an opinion poll, a non-existent company that organised the presidential debates and too many factual inaccuracies to enumerate.

There is also the Real Raila series that includes a website, sponsored social media posts and prominent Google search placements. It is a scaremongering-meets-fake-news operation that imagines a bad world in which Odinga is president and the world falls apart.

Kiambu Governor William Kabogo believes that a sustained propaganda campaign was partly to blame for his loss in the Jubilee primaries. Even repeated attempts to get in front of the tall tales in interviews and social media were not enough to repair the damage.

The future of this country is at stake and there are people deliberately creating lies and then shouting them from rooftops. There are political party and presidential campaign surrogates, employees, as well as contractors, whose sole job it is to deceive Kenyans.

I have covered three Kenyan elections and I have never seen misinformation on this scale. I came up in the social media generation so it seems oddly fitting that this is the election that could be decided by fake news.

 

Send your comments to [email protected]

 

***

KENYAN HISTORY COMES ALIVE ON STAGE

I oscillated between hysterical laughter at the clever pop references or bad puns and extreme anger at our dark history while watching Too Early for Birds at the Kenya National Theatre. The show, which seems to go on forever, is based on the well-researched stories on the historical Kenyan blog, owaah.com. It is a play on the original name of the blog, Too Late For Worms, and brings together a stellar cast for a fascinating walk through some dark paths of how Kenya came to be.

It was created by two multi-hyphenated artists, Ngartia and Abu Sense, and boy did they do it justice!

Whether you want to know how Grogan Road and Chiromo got their names, the mystery of the two lion statues outside the MacMillan Library in Nairobi or the “unbwogable-ness” of Rev Timothy Njoya, the show has it all.

It has probably too many Game of Thrones inside jokes, but it is a price I’m willing to pay for the smart, funny, instructive account of little-known corners of Kenyan history.

The Saturday show I attended was sold out, which is encouraging because everybody needs to see it.

They need to get microphones so everyone can hear in the theatre, and put it on TV.

 

***

THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE REALITY SHOW

The Mooch, as Anthony Scaramucci likes to call himself, is a character that even the tackiest reality show would say was too “extra” to be believable. And yet President Donald Trump’s new communications director is a hurricane of f-words, loyalty to Orange Mugabe and little substance. For a 53-year-old man to miss his own child’s birth just to be close to power, he has to be obsessed with getting to the top. He was hired and Press Secretary Sean Spicer — maybe finally getting a way out — quit in protest. Days after he threatened to fire everyone at the White House if he didn’t find the leakers, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, also called it a day. 

This is better than the Netflix series "House of Cards", some people have pointed out. There is now no adult supervision in the most powerful address in the world. What could possibly go wrong?