Elementor #350

● A Broken System. This lack of effective content moderation through the Kenyan election
cycle has posed substantial harm to social media users in Kenya, citizens seeking credible
information about the election, and Africa at large. Social media platforms must pay more
attention to Africa and put adequate content moderation policies in place and invest
properly in platform safety, as evidenced by the recent Global Witness investigation on hate
speech ads. Kenyan authorities and regulators must prevent companies from profiting from
harms and incentivize transparency and accountability in the future.

August 8, 2022
● Global inequities – different rules for the Global North vs. the Global South. The evidence
throughout the election cycle (here, here, here and here) demonstrates that social media
platforms are operating unchecked in Africa. These companies prioritize content moderation
in English, but they are woefully underserved when it comes to vetting mis and
disinformation in the African languages. The publication of the Facebook Papers in 2021
confirmed what activists, journalists, and civil society organizations in the Global South had
been alleging for years: that Meta/Facebook chronically underinvests in non-Western
countries, leaving millions of users even more exposed to disinformation, hate speech, and
violent content. Outright bans, however, will not improve the commitment to accountability
and transparency in the Global South.
● Terrorist content oversight. We remain profoundly alarmed about the recent findings from
the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) that Meta failed to stop the spread of hateful
terrorist content in East Africa. It was revealed that known terrorist organizations have
created a highly coordinated network to promote online propaganda and target Kenyans
with extremist content, attempting to radicalise the youth and spread harmful narratives
that undermine our elections, with specific calls to take up arms and reject human rights and
our democracy. It is difficult for the Council to believe Meta’s verbal commitments to
upholding the integrity of information around the election, and implement their own terms
of service to curtail hate speech, when something as obvious as terrorist content was
undiscovered by the company.
● Inadequate training and support for content moderators: Terrorist content violates Meta’s
own terms of service and paints a vivid and grim picture of the massive failure by Facebook
to regulate harmful content contrary to their own safeguarding and content moderation
policies, as was also highlighted in Times’ Inside Fakebook’s Africa’s Sweatshop story. This
content moderation failure is one of the reasons why Facebook is also under scrutiny for its
role in Ethiopia’s conflict where it was used by militias to seed calls for violence against
ethnic minorities.
● Longer-term solutions, consideration of a Code of Practice for Africa. With more inputs
from the public and practitioners, the ICT Ministry and Communications Authority of Kenya
could require companies to develop and publicly sign a self-regulatory Code of Practice on
Disinformation. The Code could contain explicit public commitments to take down illegal,
malicious and hateful content and actively mitigate the risks of disinformation, and
importantly, make data available to independent researchers to verify these requirements
are enforced by the companies.
● Public inputs are essential. Any major changes in social media oversight enacted by the
government or Parliament should be informed by input, stemming from a process of
engagement in advance. A new force is needed to convene conversations with Kenyan
policymakers, the peace and security sector, health practitioners, faith leaders, civil society,
tech experts and the media, to elevate mainstream voices of concern and focus on
achievable fixes to online extremism and the other harms brought by digital platforms.