Thousands of miles from Washington, D.C., Kenya has become a testing ground for disinformation before it hits America.
John-Allan Namu is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of Africa Uncensored, an outlet that exposes corruption in his native Kenya and across the globe. During a recent visit to Washington, Namu sat down with Scripps News correspondent Liz Landers to discuss the information and disinformation ecosystem in Kenya.
Liz Landers: How do you think disinformation in Kenya compares to disinformation here in the United States?
John-Allan Namu: It's very similar. What a lot of people tend to forget is that, especially when these kinds of very nefarious strategies for being able to craft disinformation are being tested, they're not tested here. What you're getting here is a final product. It's been tested elsewhere. And Kenya has been a place where this has been tested before. A great example is the Cambridge Analytica scam. All of those strategies were tested in Kenya first before they were exported anywhere else. You see this happening again and again, especially in how big tech sort of impacts itself in the world. So, you will find people in really almost slave-like conditions training algorithms in Kenya for platforms that work or are based here. So, there's very little in terms of difference.
Liz Landers: How has disinformation impacted Kenyans in general? How are you seeing disinformation spread across the African continent?
John-Allan Namu: The Internet penetration in Kenya is quite high as compared to other countries. So much like here in the States, when one bit of misinformation is seeded in one particular platform, then you start to see it move and spread across different ones. The most dangerous, obviously, are the ones that you can't track like WhatsApp and dark social platforms like that. But what you're also seeing is typically on big platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X, that you start to see these kinds of bits of disinformation moving and growing across a day, across a week. And before you are able to mend that, it’s gone very, very far.
Liz Landers: How do you, as a Kenyan journalist, view how disinformation has taken root in the United States?
John Allen: I'd say that we're all watching very keenly, especially how that First Amendment is protected because that's really the question. How do you protect a person's freedom of speech and expression, and at the same time bat down disinformation? The two are contradictory, and in a sense also complementary, because a person needs to have that freedom to go out and lie to members of the public. What are the lines? It's really one of the challenges of our time. How do you build or rebuild the kind of trust in various institutions who are doing this as honest brokers to be able to continually compete in this marketplace of ideas without touching such fundamental rights? Whether we like it or not, what happens here will reverberate across the world.
