For Mitigating Electoral Violence in Kenya, Look to the Influencers
Social media influencers help us understand how bottom-up approaches can foster digital peacebuilding.
In the earlier days of social media and the Internet, it wasn’t uncommon to feel that the digital realm was its own sphere, a retreat from our lived realities that existed in its own bubble. Now that technology is a focal point of our daily experiences, our digital lives intersect inharmoniously with our actual offline lives, amplifying dangerous content and transforming the nature of conflict. Globally, we continue to see the dangers of social media on a small-scale, such as adverse impacts on mental health and personal wellbeing, to larger magnitudes with far-reaching implications for entire communities and societies, namely, the destabilization of democracy.
Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization, found that in 2017, at least 18 countries experienced election-related disinformation that contributed to violent attacks on journalists, human rights activists, and general volatility and peace destabilization around elections. Few events capture the double-edged sword of social media than elections. At once, social media serves as a powerful tool with the potential to increase civic engagement and democratize information exchange, and yet, it continues to rear its more insidious nature where a cacophony of bad actors, bots, and algorithms create a perfect storm of amplified misinformation and disinformation that spill into real world violence.
Such is the case in Kenya, a country mired in a history of election-related violence. Longstanding tensions along ethnic and class lines are exploited by the social media ecosystem where calls for violence can be encouraged. Politicians and political elites themselves are sometimes involved in the manipulation of social media content and the pollution of information. After the results of the 2007 presidential election were released, the nation suffered two months of violence. Human Rights Watch estimates that up to 1,300 people were left dead and over 650,000 displaced. And with the 2017 Kenyan presidential election, the Supreme Court annulled the results after determining that the result was declared before results from all polling stations were received. Dozens died in protests, and judges faced threats of violence online. With this past, the August 2022 presidential elections were hotly watched with fears of the potential for violence to break out yet again. In the weeks leading up to the election, a rise in hate speech, slurs, and terms that galvanize acts of violence such as “fumigation”, were prevalent on social media platforms. The term “Kihii”, for example, refers to an uncircumcised male and is used to imply that someone is childlike and unfit for leadership. Charles Apondu, Program Manager for Peacebuilding and Conflict Management at Mercy Corps Kenya, notes that politicians will often use coded language to stoke ethnic tensions.
Despite countless examples of the negative outcomes and uses for social media, there are ways in which it can be retooled to mobilize for good, strengthen resilience of those targeted and impacted by hate speech online, and build social cohesion and peacebuilding in the digital arena. Peacebuilding research is still nascent in considering the role of social media in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Mercy Corps, alongside AIfluence, wanted to understand how the narrative can be changed and address this research gap. How can social media be leveraged for peacebuilding rather than for escalating conflict?
To address this trend of election violence, Mercy Corps has utilized technology to foster a bottom-up approach to digital peacebuilding around election-related conflict. Umoja Kwa Amani (in Swahili, United for Peace) was a 12-month election violence prevention and mitigation program with the goal of promoting peaceful elections in Kenya by strengthening the capacity of stakeholders to prevent and mitigate election violence and contribute to a peaceful transition during the August 2022 elections. Technology served as a mobilizing agent to build up digital communities with increased capacities to mitigate conflict, engage in civic education, participate in digital peacebuilding, improve coordination and collaboration amongst community members, and build upon early warning and early response mechanisms for county and nation-level stakeholders. The program was complemented by the engagement of social media micro-influencers, known as peace champions, who promoted their own digital spaces as forums for non-violence discussions. These peace champions were everyday people facilitating peer-to-peer discussions in local languages, operating with a level of trust that causes researchers and advocates alike to consider how effective social media influencers can be as tools for promotion of peace and conflict mitigation.
AIfluence, based in Nairobi, Kenya, is Africa’s first AI-powered influencer marketing platform. The platform scales impact by engaging micro-influencers as stakeholders in positive campaigns. The AIfluence model is unique in that it emphasizes the importance of bottom-up, local-led, and community-based campaigning. The micro-influencers are everyday people, rather than celebrities, who share their own messages in their own unique way. Because they already exist within a trust network of their audiences, their messages can have a farther-reaching impact than from a top-down, state-led approach.
Our peace champions have different objectives each week, such as educating audiences on how to spot the difference between real news and fake news. They then are able to emphasize these awareness campaigns by using rallying phrases, like “hope for the future”, to urge peaceful voting. In Nairobi, Nakuru, Uasin Gishu counties, peace champions posted to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok. Reach is defined as a social media user who sees the post. Engagement is defined as the number of social media users who like or share content, click links, or comment on a post. Twitter saw a high level of both reach and engagement as peace champions had larger followings there compared to other platforms.
In using social media for conflict prevention, one must not neglect the technical infrastructure of major social media platforms. On the biggest platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok, algorithms are designed to engage users and increase traffic, and platform business models thrive on this sort of extreme and divisive content. Sensational content is then fodder for these algorithms, and the information becomes widespread and repeatedly shared by users. Countering these algorithms and their ability to quickly and widely spread harmful information is key to digital peacebuilding. Social media influencers can commercialize their influencer role to spread positive messages to depolarize discourse and contribute to electoral peace. In a sentiment analysis, 67% of the targeted audience expressed appreciation and positive feelings about the peace champions’ messages. Comparatively, 32% felt neutral and just 1% found the messages to be negative.
These insights are even more valuable once done at a granular level for each county and each stage of the election cycle. Throughout the campaign, our team noted that different counties during different periods of the election cycle saw the emergence of specific terms used in a hate speech context that could incite violence. With major technology platforms lacking in content moderation, especially for countries in the Global South where local language knowledge is key to moderation, the peace champions fill a critical gap.
There is an exciting opportunity to expand research and programming into how social media can be used for bottom-up peacebuilding and conflict mitigation. From our own baseline study, 62% of participants felt that local and community led social media interventions were the preferred method of combatting hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, and social media weaponization. 62% of respondents also felt that online polarization impacts in-person relationships, making trust bonds, cooperation, and collaboration quite fragile around contentious issues like elections. And regarding what type of content is ripe for violence, 62.4% identified hate speech targeting particular communities and polarizing posts based on ethnicity as key triggers for violence.
Globally, we are facing polluted information ecosystems that harm our communities. Politicians wield their status to incite and mobilize violence, sometimes along ethnic lines. Larger technology platforms are ill-equipped to effectively moderate with the localized, culturally-relevant lens required. An innovative approach is to build a healthier digital ecosystem from the bottom-up by working with the everyday people most impacted by hate speech and violence. Far too often, youth are overlooked as key stakeholders, a grave oversight considering 40% of registered voters in Kenya are between the ages of 18 and 35. It’s time they are turned to as agents of change.
