“TikTok is failing its first real test in Africa,” a report by Mozilla Fellow Odanga Madung reprimands.
The report reveals an alarming trend on the dance app that is easily overlooked as a harmless, feel-good platform. There were more than 130 TikTok videos that either shared content qualified as hate speech and incitement, as well as manipulated content geared towards swaying public opinion ahead of Kenya’s August 9, 2022 elections. These videos reached millions, with a recorded engagement of more than four million TikTok users.
This kind of content is in breach of TikTok’s terms of service, community guidelines and policies, part of which ban political ads.
When conducting his investigation, Odanga had a conversation with former TikTok moderator Gadear Ayed. Their conversation brought to light TikTok’s unfamiliarity with the Kenyan political context explaining why the videos are still active on the platform.
“Sometimes the people moderating the platform don’t know who the entities in the videos are, and therefore the videos can be left to spread due to lack of knowledge of context. It is common to find moderators being asked to moderate videos that were in languages and contexts that were different from what they understood,” Gadear said.
Some argued that it is the same lack of local contextualization on Twitter that brewed the battle between Nigerian President Muhamud Buhari and Twitter. In June 2021, Twitter deleted a tweet published on Buhari’s official account. The tweet was a statement in regard to the Nigeria-Biafra war. The tweet was perceived as an official anti-Biafra statement and was hence flagged then deleted. Therefore, President Buhari banned Twitter in Nigeria, announcing this move on the very same platform.
Responding to the situation, Nigerian information minister Lai Mohammed hinted at the lack of local context when he said;
“When people were burning police stations and killing policemen in Nigeria during EndSARS, for Twitter it was about the right to protest. But when a similar thing happened on the Capitol, it became insurrection.”
After seven months of a Twitter blackout in Nigeria, the platform folded by agreeing to open a local office, pay taxes, and be sensitive to national security as revealed in this report on ‘How Twitter rolled over to get unblocked in Nigeria’.
In the Mozilla report, Odanga hints that; “Kenya’s election is TikTok’s first real test in an African democratic process.” The app that launched in 2016 set up shop in Nairobi in January 2018. Albeit this was mainly to gain a footing in the African market and enroll more users at a time when WhatsApp, followed by Facebook were the most popular in the continent. Today, TikTok is the most downloaded app in Kenya. The company concerted efforts in hiring talent that would bring new subscribers. It now says that it also focuses on moderating content, having invested in fact-checking partnerships in Kenya and Africa. But investigations on the Mozilla report revealed that TikTok did not have any labeling policies for misinformation and potentially harmful content particularly applying to Kenya during an elections season.
Little to no effort is on moderating content than on amassing more and more subscribers by the day. Ayed told Mozilla that she would moderate up to 1,000 videos for TikTok a day, mostly to meet her KPIs. She narrates about a time she had to moderate videos that were in Hebrew yet she does not understand the language.
“All I could rely on was the visual image of what I could see but anything written I couldn’t moderate,” she said, “What we had were targets of videos to moderate per day. So you wouldn’t want to watch a video too much because that will get in the way of you achieving your target. Sometimes we would watch a video at two- to three-times the speed to get around this problem.”
A 2008 research paper by Hezron Ndunde of Egerton University, proves that the Kenyan electorate’s reliance on rumours for political information fueled the 2007 post-election violence.
To minimise this eventuality in the upcoming elections, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) banned the use of words like hatupangwingwi, kama mbaya;mbaya, madoadoa, uncircumcised, kwekwe, fumigation, kill, kaffir, chinja kaffir, eliminate, watu wa kurusha mawe, watajua hawajui, wabara waende, and operation linda kura.
Politicians and their supporters have blatantly ignored this directive. Deputy President William Ruto for inatnce used hatupangwingwi at a public address and the footage circulated on TikTok.
On the other hand, Ruto’s opponent and fellow presidential aspirant Raila Odinga also used the term madoadoa even after the NCIC directive. Footage of the same was also shared on TikTok. The video has more than 61,000 views, 784 likes and 153 comments thus far.
Content shared under hashtags like #siasa, #siaisazakenya, #hatupangwingwi, as well as hashtags bearing names of political candidates, their parties, key locations and ethnic communities garnered over 20 million views according to findings on the Mozilla report. Some were pulled down but others are still in circulation.
Traditionally political debates were done on mainstream media, however, with many raising questions about the biases of various media houses social media has been incorporated to cater for this trust deficit. People with malicious intentions are however poisoning this space and in politically charged places like Kenya, their sentiments are likely to cause division and trigger violence.
The clarion call for Kenyans and Africans at large is hence to have their online environment decontaminated from the pollution of harmful, inciteful content that has a proven track record of actually costing lives.
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