Kenya’s social media election: attack ads and data mining

“There are concerns about the integrity of data in Kenya. Who would have access to it? Who is storing it? Do people even know what is being collected about them? None of these questions are being answered,” she said.

Others are concerned about what happens when you seek to segment a society for electoral purposes where already politicians’ primary appeals are to their ethnic constituents.

“There are very strong communities in Kenya and that’s exactly the kind of situation present where you can start to drive different conversations about the election in different sub-communities,” said Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has studied CA’s techniques.

“We’ve seen it with Brexit and the US election, and the same can be done in Kenya, or elsewhere that there’s a lot of fragmentation already.”

– Fake news, trolls and bots –

“Fake news”, a term that dominates political discourse in the United States, has already made itself felt in Kenya’s election

Jeffrey Smith, executive director of the US-based Vanguard Africa, an organisation promoting free and fair elections, has been under attack since he invited Odinga to the United States in March to meet policymakers.

Soon afterwards fake letters — complete with Vanguard’s company header and Smith’s forged signature — began to circulate on Kenyan social media purporting to reveal efforts to rig Kenya’s election for Odinga.

Smith then started suffering at the hands of trolls.

“At least once a week I’ll wake up and have hundreds of Twitter notifications from accounts that are clearly bots and trolls tweeting in a coordinated manner, posting the same bogus and entirely false information over and over again,” Smith said.

Data scientist Timothy Oriedo, founder of consulting company Vault Global, acknowledges the growing importance of the online battleground but says old-style tactics still play a key role.

“The old techniques of voter suppression, the normal things, will continue: ballot stuffing, gerrymandering,” he added.