In the race for clicks, not even death is taboo

Kanana Gichuru was popular in life and famous in death. Her death three weeks ago was a trending topic on social media within moments of her demise.

For days, images of her badly damaged BMW that rammed into a lorry on Nairobi’s Eastern bypass were shared freely, circulating to millions of Internet users at lightning speed.

It was shocking — that such gruesome pictures could be shared with relish — but it was traumatising for her family and close friends who had to live through the social media firestorm.

Her husband, Mr Richard Wainaina, was at home when a friend sent him a picture of his wife’s car. The same thing was happening in real-time to all her family. Even her father found out about her death on social media.

Mr Wainaina says he was at home when the ghastly images of his actress wife’s car and lifeless body started streaming in. He learnt about it on social media.

“A friend called me and told me about the accident and then forwarded the images,” he recalls. “Everything happened fast; the next thing was to rush to the accident scene.”

Welcome to the world of social media where a no-holds-barred popularity contest has driven people to pose naked, post all manner of outlandish comments, viciously breach their own privacy and that of others, and share pictures and videos of all manner in a murderous race to win the most followers and come out on top — even if that means dancing on a fresh grave.

While the husband was mourning the death of his wife of less than a year, social media “experts”, as he calls them, got to work.

People rummaged through her social media platforms like sleuths for hire, looking for anything they could post on their own platforms for the popularity contest known on social media as Likes and Follows. Technology has forever changed the way people grieve, and it looks like nothing can be done about it.

Some started saying it was suicide, owing to “how deep the car was under the lorry” while others said she deserved it as “she looked like she was a reckless driver.”

It is the age of death in the time of social media. There’s no accepted moral code on what to say about the departed, or how to behave — it depends on the millions of tweets or Facebook updates going up every minute around the world.

In today’s digital age, the image of the car crash could have gone around a few thousand times before the family even had an idea what had happened to their beloved.

Mr Wainaina expected the firestorm. “She was in the limelight and I knew there would be a lot of interest; so I went off Facebook to insulate myself from whatever was happening,” he says.

He just wishes people didn’t forward the graphic images or posted the hateful messages on Facebook and Twitter, but he knows you cannot control people and what they do on their social media pages.

But Mr Kiplimo Rugut, the secretary in the Sports ministry who lost his daughter to heart failure, but which death elicited another social media storm owing to a rumour that she had been electrocuted by earphones, is more candid when it comes to the all-too-eager social media users who make up stories.

Even before the family could get to grips with Leslie Chepkoech’s death, self-styled social media sleuths were hard at work spewing opinions and made-up stories of how she was electrocuted by earphones in her sleep.

Addressing a gathering at his home at Lessos, Nandi County, Mr Rugut said social media speculators should have consulted the family before they shared the information.

“I want to state categorically that my daughter was not electrocuted. Doctors conducted an autopsy and told us that she had died of heart failure,” he said.

“People have come up with speculations. There was nothing like that. It is not good to spread information which may lead to double tragedy.”

Psychologist Mbutu Kariuki blames all this on “casualisation” of death, saying many young people no longer have respect for the dead.

“You go to funerals and there are young people taking selfies in front of an open casket; kids these days flock the graveyard just to take videos,” says Mr Mbutu. “It is a strange phenomenon that needs to be interrogated. I have never seen anything like this before.”

Mr Mbutu says that while there is no easy way of breaking bad news to people, it is a bit crude the way family members learn of their loved one’s death.

“I still can’t figure out what gets people to want to be so crude and post such things about another person, not caring about their families and friends. It cannot just be about likes and follows, there is something wrong somewhere,” he adds.