If it cared, TikTok could inform not inflame Kenya's political debate Odanga Madung

Over the past year, I have submerged myself in propaganda, trying to study the information nerve-endings of Kenyan politics.

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What I have uncovered is how the production of disinformation became a cottage industry in Kenya, how disinformation can be used as a tool to consolidate power, and how European far-right groups have tried to manipulate Kenyan platforms.

As I waded through all this content, I would always find several TikTok videos being distributed across platforms. So I decided to focus on TikTok to try to get a sense of the world where these videos were originating.

TikTok likes to position itself as a dancing and lip-syncing app, but my investigation unearthed a lot more than that. There were brazen calls for ethnic hatred and violence. One video contained a clip of a political candidate giving a speech at a rally with a caption saying that he hates "Kikuyus [an ethnic tribe in Kenya] and will be seeking revenge in 2022." Another took on the form of a detergent infomercial, saying that "UDA [a Kenyan political party] can be used to remove madoadoa ["stains"] such as Kikuyus, Luhyas, Luos and even Kambas." (All these are tribes in Kenya.) I also encountered phoney content: slickly produced videos containing fake assertions, styled as if they're from authentic Netflix documentaries, local TV stations or even US president Joe Biden's Twitter account.