Information Cascades in Kenya’s Pre-Election Disinformation
Kenya just ended a closely contested presidential election on August 8th, in which H.E William Ruto defeated Hon Raila Odinga to rule the country for the next five years. Unlike previous elections, however, this year’s race was primarily fought on social media platforms, with each candidate hiring teams of social media bigwigs to push their agenda, both attempting to make the other candidate appear unqualified for public office. This also included disseminating bogus news such as endorsements from international leaders like former President Barack Obama, while others accused their competitors of threatening to shut down multibillion-dollar companies such as Safaricom, which employed a large number of people.
As I dug more into the diffusion and reception of fake news, I couldn’t help myself from drawing parallels with Information Cascades taught in Networks. Consider how Hon. Raila Odinga’s opponents used his own words against him when he launched his manifesto and expressed plans to ban the importation of used clothes from Europe. In the launch, he promised to restore the country’s textile industry before banning the import of used garments, thus ensuring people are not rendered jobless. His detractors, however, rallied around the idea that Raila wanted to put everyone who worked in the secondhand clothing industry out of work. The spread of this news followed the Information Cascade model, in which most people believed the disinformation being spread and ignored their own independent assessments (independent signals) since that is what the majority thought.
Another example of how people ignored making independent decisions in favor of the Information Cascade model was when the current deputy president, H.E Rigathi Gachagua, gave a vernacular interview that was posted online with a sub-titled English translation that read: “We will kill it [Safaricom- a multimillion telecom company] and give that money to the people as handouts.” It was apparent that the idea was not intended to “destroy” Safaricom; rather, it was intended to transfer revenues to help smaller businesses. However, citizens were misled by Gachagua’s detractors thus ignoring what they heard (their own independent signals) and adopting the information cascade paradigm where everyone goes with the majority thought.
https://www.stimson.org/2022/disinformation-and-democratic-transition-a-kenyan-case-study/
https://www.ned.org/during-kenyas-election-ned-partners-target-online-misinformation/
Carey Okal Manwa
Class of 2026