The Dance App That Named a Target

Weeks before Kenyans voted in August 2022, a Mozilla investigation identified more than 130 TikTok videos carrying hate speech and ethnic incitement. Some, boosted by the platform's recommendation feed, drew hundreds of thousands of views.

In the run-up to Kenya's August 2022 general election, a short-video app better known for dance clips became a channel for political disinformation and ethnic incitement. A researcher who examined the platform found that content prohibited under its own rules was not only present but spreading widely.

The Mozilla Foundation published the findings in June 2022. Its investigation identified more than 130 TikTok videos featuring hate speech, incitement and political disinformation, drawn from 33 accounts. Together, according to Mozilla, the videos had been viewed more than four million times, breaching TikTok policies on hate speech, discrimination, incitement and inauthenticity, Al Jazeera reported.

Old wounds, new reach

Kenya has a history of election-related bloodshed. More than 1,000 people were killed in violence that followed the disputed 2007 vote, a memory that shadows every subsequent campaign. Odanga Madung, the Kenya-based researcher and Mozilla Fellow who conducted the study, placed the videos against that backdrop. “Kenya's democracy carries a tainted past of post-election violence,” he wrote in the Mozilla report. “Now, political disinformation on TikTok – in violation of the platform's own policies – is stirring up this highly volatile political landscape.”

The content ranged from doctored footage to explicit threats. One video falsely claiming that deputy president William Ruto “hates Kikuyus” drew more than 445,000 views, Al Jazeera noted, while other clips depicted candidates in blood-stained clothing or recycled fabricated news bulletins.

A feed built to amplify

Madung attributed much of the spread to the way TikTok surfaces content. He told Rest of World that the videos were “algorithmically boosted” by the recommendation system that populates users' feeds. “The For You page is not only able to give [these videos] wings, but it's able to give them a rocket booster,” he said. He framed the effect in stark terms, describing the disinformation as “like adding salt to an existing open wound.”

The report also pointed to gaps in moderation. It found what it described as a “deep unfamiliarity with the Kenyan political context” among those reviewing content, with moderators sometimes assigned to unfamiliar languages and working under pressure to meet daily targets, according to Rest of World.

The platform's response

After reviewing the findings, TikTok removed several of the videos and suspended accounts that it said did not comply with its guidelines, Al Jazeera reported. The company said it had a team working to safeguard the platform during Kenya's elections and that it partnered with the fact-checking service of Agence France-Presse in the country and offered moderation support in Swahili, though it did not disclose how many moderators it deployed or whether other widely spoken Kenyan languages were covered, Rest of World reported.

Madung cast the Kenyan case as a warning beyond one election. “We are calling it out as early as we can,” he told Rest of World, “but it's likely the [For You page] will be key in terms of the broader disinformation threats that are going to spread through the rest of the continent.”