from Hacker News

Disinformation-for-hire in Kenya

by adz_6891 on 9/8/21, 10:07 AM with 101 comments

• by bunnernana on 9/8/21, 2:12 PM

  Am reading through the comments and I have to say westerners really think all news is about them. People who don't understand the context of a story arguing out the ethics of a story they have no idea about. PS: I am a Kenyan. That being said, any Kenyan here who uses Twitter regularly will agree with the article. Go to Twitter right now and you will see the disinformation in action. Trend number 1 (Nyonga) Trend number 3 (Kenya under Raila) are all political trends that are being promoted by "fake accounts" pushing the hashtags. Everyday new hashtags come up peddling the same misinformation against political rivals. This has been happening almost EVERYDAY for the last several months and it will only get worse as we near elections which is exactly one year away.

• by dexen on 9/8/21, 12:19 PM

  Why is Mozilla, of all orgs, performing foreign activism and reporting on Twitter users in hopes of getting them banned? "We want to do good", sure, but that's two bits of a stretch here.

  Nothing in the article as posted indicates that the "disinformation influencers" were nefarious actors. For all the description given, it might have been grassroots citizens action, only labeled "disinformation" by officials or government-aligned sources. The end result is Mozilla making arbitrary choice between two opposing camps of political activists - and reports on Twitter users along those lines with clear hopes of getting them banned.

  I'd understand the point if the activism was directly related to open internet, to freedom of expression, interoperability of services, ease of access and so forth - if there were concerns closely related to Mozilla's core mission. However nothing in the article nor in the linked PDF seem to allude to any of such concerns. It feels like a small group of Mozilla employees[1] ran this research and reported on users for their own private reasons.

  [1] "in-house activists" might be a more charitable characterization

• by uniqueuid on 9/8/21, 12:44 PM

  Having read the report, I think this is an interesting but rather weak analysis.

  Detection of inauthentic behavior is very hard and fraught with false positives, so it's really important to be very transparent in the methods.

  That said, the numbers are not too small, they do have some interviews with participants and Twitter seems to have removed some accounts - all these lend the report some credibility.

• by recursivedoubts on 9/8/21, 12:53 PM

  > "New research by two Mozilla Fellows reveals how malicious, coordinated, and inauthentic attacks on Twitter are undermining Kenyan civil society"

  i am glad that we here in the west are not subject to this sort of social media engineering and can participate in open and thoughtful debate on topics no matter how our elites feel about them

• by ziml77 on 9/8/21, 12:13 PM

  So are platforms supposed to regulate speech or not? People complain if they stay neutral and don't remove false information and people complain if they moderate and do remove false information.

• by h2odragon on 9/8/21, 1:25 PM

  Should we be looking forward to a "Mozilla Misinformation Registry" and a web browser that will only show us clean sites?

• by ceilingcorner on 9/8/21, 12:16 PM

  Sorry but unless you provide actual links to so-called misinformation, I’m going to assume that this is either overexaggerated or labeling anything against Western values as disinformation.

  Especially when it is described as ”This industry’s main goal is to sway public opinion during elections and protests” which is different than every other media organization how, exactly?

• by merricksb on 9/8/21, 12:17 PM

  Smallish discussion about the same topic yesterday:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444490

• by aaccount on 9/9/21, 2:51 AM

  missed the opportunity to call it Disinformation As A Service