Trending political news in kenya today12/28/2023 “This was political astroturfing that used a mix of propaganda and mal-information. “Of key importance here was that many of these narratives were not explicitly lies,” Madung wrote. The content specifically sought to exonerate Kenyatta, playing down revelations around his hidden wealth, arguing that the practice did not violate any laws and defending the offshore holdings as a savvy financial move.īy cross-referencing previous research, Madung also found that some accounts boosting the inauthentic content were previously identified spreading adjacent pro-government propaganda in Kenya. The researchers unearthed a number of accounts promoting related hashtags in repeated tweets and nothing else. “… As a result, a distorted perspective began to gain momentum - one where Kenyans appeared outraged not by the Pandora Paper’s damning findings, but by their implication that Uhuru Kenyatta is guilty of wrongdoing.”įrom their analysis, those trends were far from organic. “With the government and the president under pressure, due to soaring online outrage, a counternarrative operation was mounted - and found a strong ally in Twitter,” Madung wrote. They discovered two hashtags, #offshoreaccountfacts and #phonyleaks - both seeking to undermine the legitimate revelations held in the leaked financial files - that vaulted into Kenya’s trending topics during the period. Using Twitter’s Firehose API, the researchers analyzed 8,331 tweets sent between October 3 and October 10 following the publication of the Pandora Papers. “This is a very pervasive problem with Twitter’s platform here in Kenya,” Madung told TechCrunch. In new research, Madung and supporting researcher Brian Obilo, both Mozilla Tech and Society Fellows, reveal how online political propaganda filled the information vacuum in the country in the immediate wake of the Pandora Papers. The Kenyan president’s concealed accounts were just one secret revealed in the Pandora Papers, a trove of nearly 12 million leaked files detailing the hidden fortunes of a number of global leaders, celebrities and billionaires all hoarding their wealth in places like Panama and the British Virgin Islands. In spite of the damning information implicating Kenyatta in a hypocritical tax shelter scheme, the prevailing conversation on Kenyan Twitter focused on defending the country’s beleaguered leader. In the days immediately following revelations that Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta held secret wealth in offshore tax havens, Odanga Madung noticed something odd on Twitter.
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