Many videos contain explicit threats of ethnic violence, targeting communities based in particular in the Rift Valley region.
Le Monde with AFP
Videos propagating hate speech, disinformation and threats of ethnic violence circulate on Tiktok before the August elections in Kenya, affirms the Mozilla foundation in a report Wednesday June 8, pointing “gaps” of the platform to remove these dangerous content.
The presidential, legislative and local elections of August 9 are closely scrutinized in this country in East Africa, where the polls have repeatedly given rise to violence. The American non -profit organization Mozilla has thus analyzed 130 videos combining more than 4 million views on the Tiktok network, the most downloaded application in Kenya.
“Kenyan democracy carries a story tainted with post -electoral violence. At the moment, political disinformation on Tiktok – in violation of the platform policies – agitates this very unstable political landscape”, writes the author of the report , Odanga Madung.
Many videos contain explicit threats of ethnic violence targeting communities based in the Rift Valley region, according to Mozilla. One of these videos, viewed more than 400,000 times, claims that one of the presidential candidates hates a particular community and that he will target her if he arrives in power.
Gaps in moderation
This wave of disinformation also includes false television news, pages of trafficked newspapers and false surveys. “The target content of specific communities with threats and uses past violence as a tool of fear,” said the report, recalling that similar stories had been peddled during the 2007 election, whose disputed result triggered violence post-electoral cautiously killed.
Mozilla indicates that Tiktok has deleted several videos and suspended many accounts after having read the report. In a statement transmitted to AFP, the platform, ownership of the Chinese giant bytedance, ensures “prohibit and suppress electoral disinformation, the promotion of violence and other violations of our policies”.
The company also indicated that it “would deploy features (…) to connect users with information authority over the elections in Kenya”. The last two Kenyan elections have been tainted with accusations of interference via social networks.
of English media revealed that the British company Cambridge Analytica used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to do targeted political communication during the 2013 and 2017 campaigns.
According to Mozilla, “Tiktok’s gaps in moderation (…) only put oil on fire”. A former Tiktok employee interviewed by the organization said that moderators were often led to examine content, sometimes without knowing the context or the language used.
“Rather than learning more established platform errors like Facebook and Twitter, Tiktok follows their traces, hosting and spreading political disinformation before a delicate African election,” said the report. AFP is a partner of Tiktok, providing fact verification services in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.