The video resembles the trailer for the Netflix documentary "The Course of the Tyrants".

But very quickly, the subject is detached from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein, to focus more and more on one of the two main candidates for the Kenyan presidential election, scheduled for August: the current vice- President William Ruto.

Everything is done to suggest that he has the makings of the worst dictators.

This video is one of 133 examples of disinformation included in a report on election propaganda on TikTok, in the context of the presidential campaign in Kenya, published by the Mozilla Foundation on Thursday, June 9.

More than four million views for 133 videos

William Ruto is not the only victim of these attacks on the social network, where the perpetrators are impossible to identify due to lack of transparency on the origin of the accounts.

The main opponent of the vice-president, Raila Odinga, who is supported by outgoing president Uhuru Kenyatta, is also paying the price.

Several videos also show him as a sower of chaos who, if he became president, would attack his opponents without fear of triggering bloodbaths.

All these videos that have circulated widely on the famous social network of Chinese origin - these 133 clips have been viewed more than four million times - have one thing in common.

"They all raise the specter of post-election violence in Kenya," summarizes Odanga Madung, the author of the report. 

The country is still marked by the clashes that followed the highly disputed presidential election of 2007. More than 1,100 people died during this serious political crisis, and approximately 300,000 Kenyans were displaced.

This dark episode in the country's recent political history has often served as ammunition for the disinformation campaigns that have multiplied in recent years on traditional social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

In 2017, infamous Cambridge Analytica - at the heart of a major Facebook data breach scandal in 2018 - cracked down on Kenya to smear then-presidential opponent Uhuru Kenyatta (who doesn't was other than his current ally Raila Odinga…).

But TikTok had so far been spared the criticism leveled at the big platforms over the spread of "Fake News" in Kenya and more generally in Africa.

This relatively new social network - it was created in 2016 - has long benefited from an image of a service used almost exclusively to distribute music and dance videos, when "in reality it plays an increasingly important role in the political debate," reads the Mozilla Foundation report.

Young people in the crosshairs of misinformation

Above all, "it is the social network that has had the most significant progress since 2017 to become one of the most used in Kenya", underlines Odanga Madung.

With nearly 10% of the population now connecting to it daily, it would be incongruous to ignore it for anyone seeking to understand the impact of misinformation on public opinion.

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TikTok has another advantage for any apprentice disinformator: "Unlike Twitter or Facebook, you don't need to have a lot of followers to successfully produce viral content," notes Odanga Madung.

A clever use of the right hashtags, which will please the TikTok algorithm - such as #siasa and #siasazakenya (which translates to politics and Kenyan politics) - has thus resulted in only 33 accounts spreading violent and propaganda content to several million Kenyans.

And not to just any Internet user.

TikTok is mainly populated, in Kenya as elsewhere in the world, by young people who are not yet or have just reached the legal voting age - 18 years old.

It is a population whose political maturity is still in the making and who are, therefore, "all the more influenced by propaganda on their favorite social network", sums up Odanga Madung.

In this regard, the August 9 presidential election "is, for many, the mother of all elections", assures this specialist in data analysis and the media landscape in Kenya.

“There have never been so many young voters, so many connected voters who are, at the same time, politically disillusioned,” he adds.

This is why the repeated reminders in these videos of past violence and the attempts to portray one or the other of the candidates as a monster ready to set the country on fire and blood are messages perfectly suited to the target audience.

These videos aim to create a climate of fear in order to convey the message to the most disillusioned that it is their safety, even their life, that is at stake.

“TikTok failed its first big test in Africa”

Several of these videos were removed by TikTok after the report was published.

But it was already too late, they had reached a large audience.

"One would have hoped that TikTok would have learned from Facebook's failures in its content moderation policy in Africa. It is not so: the Chinese social network has made the same mistakes", regrets Odanga Madung.

For him, this "election was the first big test for the social network on the African continent and it failed in large widths".

Moderation has not been there, and the number of videos contrary to the rules of the social network which have been identified proves that "promises about content verification procedures have not been followed up" , regrets the author of the report.

TikTok does have moderators in Africa, but one - a woman interviewed for the Mozilla report - said working conditions made the task overwhelming.

These moderators must, for example, check a number of videos per day – up to 1,000 – which means that sometimes “we have to watch them in fast motion to fulfill our objectives”, she explains.

"TikTok is neglecting its responsibilities in Kenya and probably on the continent", summarizes Odanga Madung.

This laissez-faire approach to hateful content on an increasingly influential platform is not without real risk.

The role of Facebook has often been cited as an aggravating factor in ethnic violence in Burma or Ethiopia. 

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