 I will apologize in advance in case my video freezes because it is bandwidth has been a bit of a challenge the last couple of days. So hi everyone, my name is Nanjala Nyabola as you heard. Welcome to my home. This isn't exactly how we all featured this event going down but I'm just so grateful that the team has thought creatively about keeping this going because I think it's such an important forum and especially as we look at what's happening in the world right now, I think it's really important to touch base with some of the values and principles and ideas that underpin the innovations that are coming up around us. The global health pandemic is the global health crisis is consuming a lot of oxygen in the room, it's taking up a lot of space and rightly so it's a really, this is an inflection point I think for human, just the way we do life. Like Mark said, we're never gonna be the same again as global society. But some of the moments that are happening also have to do with technology, we're thinking about surveillance, we're thinking about smart cities and we're thinking about, I was reading this article about these smart thermometers that people have these thermometers that are hooked up to the internet and the platform, the people who provide the tech are now able to map people's body temperatures in the United States. And there was a guy who was trying to speculate online as to whether Florida is actually in the middle of COVID-19 outbreak. And there's so many layers to that that just off the top of your head, you kind of think, wow, first of all, yes, it's anonymized data, but it's all on Twitter and people are speculating on so many things that are probably better left in the hands of experts and public health analysts and the intersection between privacy and policy making and all of that stuff is stuff that we're gonna really have to think about hard. Surveillance has become a big part of the fight against COVID-19 in a lot of countries and we have to check ourselves and checking with our values. So what I'm gonna be doing with this presentation is hopefully providing a moment for that, for checking in with our values about civic tech and what it means to build technology for politics and for democracy with a small D that is not necessarily standing in line to cast your ballots, but actually the participation in our societies, what does that look like? What kind of values do we wanna hold up? And as Mark said, I'm gonna be drawing a lot from my own research in Kenya, which is where I'm born and raised, where I live. But I think that the lessons of Kenya are applicable in so many contexts because a lot of the stuff as a society, early adopters certainly in terms of developing countries, we've had a lot of moments of friction and we've had a lot of moments where it's kind of felt like everything was going to fall apart and then didn't at the very last moment. And so even as I talked about Kenya, I hope that you would find things and you would draw things that you can apply in your own national, international, regional context. And as I said, I'm not going to tell you stuff, I'm going to give you some things to think about and leave you with some questions that I'm grappling with as a researcher, as a participant in this space and I hope that they will be applicable to you too. I wanted to start by, it's really actually very handy for me that we're doing this format because I never make slides. So I'm not gonna make slides, I'm just gonna, I have very physical things that I demonstrate with my arms. But I just want you to imagine a triangle with the state at the top and the citizen in one corner and the corporations on the other corner. To me, this triangle kind of represents the relationship between the three key actors in the space of technology and participation in democracy and society. And what you want in an ideal world is do you want balance? You want a healthy tension between the three points of the triangle in order for there to be a successful relationship. Once one angle, once one point of the triangle has far more power than the others, that once there's a little sense of imbalance, then you start to have these challenges that play out in the democratic space. And that's exactly what happens in Kenya. We went from a process whereby the citizen had taken the lead in using technology and incorporating technology into public participation to a point where we're at now where the states and the corporations almost in collusion with each other have way too much power. So it's become really difficult as a citizen to find voice and to be able to be represented in your society. But if you think about it just theoretically, then what's the point? What's the point of being in a society? Like the questions that we're asking ourselves about now with COVID-19, what's the point of being a society, of being a polity if your state is paying more attention to the interests of a corporation than it is to the interests of the citizen? This is the tension that I think underpins a lot of the conversations that we're having right now about civic tech that we are entering a moment whereby the people who are building the technology have a tremendous amount of power in the legislative space, in the participation space, in the representation space. And the people who are consuming, the people who are legislating the states are more responsive to corporations than they are to citizens. And it's disrupting our lives. I think about social media, for example. Myself as a Kenyan social media user, if there is a moment where a social media platform, a British Public Relations Corporation, can use social media to develop hate speech and targeting a Kenyan election, trying to inform a Kenyan electorate. And that results in violence in Kenya. What recourse do I have as a Kenyan citizen? Because the social media company is responsive to an American shareholder, is responsive to an American legislator, is governed by the American state. Where do I come in? What can I vote? I can't vote. I don't own shares in the company. I don't have any control over what happens in that space. And so for me, it's coming back to the fundamental is about balance and it's about synergy. And the second point that I want to make tight to that that I want to underscore before I go into my presentation is this word citizen. I think it's really important for us to be very deliberate about using the word citizen and not consumer and not user. Because I think citizen recognizes that as human beings, there's a political context in which we are adopting this technology and we're using the technology. Citizens have rights. Citizens have even obligations within their political space. Consumers, consumers are passive. Consumers receive. Consumers are only valuable in as much as, for example, they have monetary contribution. Like they can pay for something, then you become a consumer. But if you're not paying for something, then you're almost invalid in that particular discourse. Again, I go back to the example of social media. And I think about how we say there are 100,000, for example, 100,000 Twitter accounts in Kenya. That's not the number, just an example. And there are 47 million people in Kenya. 20 million of those are adults. If there are 100,000 Twitter consumers, then Twitter is in conversation with those particular 100,000 people. The remaining 19.9 million people are not part of that conversation. But what happens with that particular framework is what if the discourse that's happening on that social network is affecting political participation, is affecting how people vote, it's misinformation, it's disinformation, it's all of these things that are going to have real-world consequences for the remaining 19.9 million people. That's why I'm very, very deliberate about using the word citizen in my discourse and not the word consumer and not the word user. Because I want us to be very intentional about recognizing the political and social context into which we put this technology that human beings, seeing the human being in the 360 and not just in relation to that particular product, how that person incorporated into their life. So with that in mind, just a very brief political history of Kenya. Whenever I speak about my book, I always have to qualify and say, I didn't write about Kenya just because I am Kenyan, although it helps. But I wrote about Kenya because, when you read about technology in the developing world, Kenya comes up quite a bit. We talk about mobile money and we talk about how it's the largest, it used to be the most users, but now I think Bangladesh has more users. Even though Bangladesh is a much bigger country, population-wise, in 2017, mobile money transactions amounted to the equivalent of one third of Kenya's GDP. So that's a tremendous amount of money that people are moving around and it has had a tangible impact in the way people relate to public life. But the reason why I picked Kenya is because I think it demonstrates really a lot of the collisions between tech and society that the rest of the world is now having to grapple with. Whether we're talking about foreign influence in elections, whether we're talking about going fully digital, having computerized elections as opposed to paper-based votes, whether we're talking about misinformation, disinformation, you know, the UK is worrying about this in 2017, we've been worrying about it since 2013, whether we're talking about the retreats of the traditional media and their rise of social media as the main site for political discourse. These are all things that Kenya has been at the forefront of over the last 10, 15 years. And so that's why I thought it was a really interesting point of study to sort of, if I had written a book, as I say this in the book, if I had written a book about the United States, I wouldn't have had to qualify it in that way. I wouldn't have had to say, well, you know, actually, you know, this is the reason why. But when we think about the developing world and technology, we tend to see it almost in, I say pathological way, like it's like a little island, like the developing countries are doing this thing and the rest of us are doing this thing. And this thing that the developed world is doing is universal, but this other thing is very specific. But the point I wanted to make is that it can be universalized. And so just like a lightning round history of Kenya, colonization, 1897, war of independence between 1952 and 1959, independence in 1963, one party rule from 1963 until 1992, we have our first multi-party election in 1992. The 40 years, the 30 odd years before that have all been characterized by, you know, political instability, assassinations, and increasing, increasing, increasing authoritarianism and attention between the press and the government and this whole public sphere that's trying to emerge but is finding resistance from the authoritarian state. So 1992 election we have, the first multi-party election is violent. 1997 we have an election, it's also violent. 2002 is the first election that we've had since independence that is considered peaceful. There is a transition between the authoritarian state and the opposition. And it's a moment of hope. After all of these years, finally we're starting to get the hang of this democracy thing. 2005 we had a constitutional referendum and again, the opposition wins but it's not the same opposition. There's been some realignment. And we're going into the 2007 election with an opposition that has social momentum, that has the belief that they're going to win the 2007 election. And so when the election commission in 2007 announces that the president has won, it is incredibly disruptive. Like there's, it's the most, the 97, 92 elections are more violent but the 2007 election happened in a very short window of time. The president is sworn in in the middle of the night because there's protests in the streets and people are being arrested and being killed. And so what had happened between 2005 and 2006 is what sets the tone for everything that comes next. First of all, you had the innovations of social media, all kinds of blogging starts to take off because the traditional media has, after that upswing in the 90s, has started to retreat once again. And there was very obvious intimidation by the state. For example, we had one incident whereby the second largest newspaper, their offices was burnt down and the minister for internal security was interviewed and asked, we saw people in fatigues at this fire and he said, without denying it, what do you expect? If you rattlesnake, you can expect to get bitten. And this is an admission by the state that they were involved in the violence against the free press. We had a lot of incidents of intimidation and blogging then starts to take shape as a place where people can start to have conversations and participate in the polity. You had mobile money invented, sort of launched in 2006. And again, it's important to remember Kenya's a dual system. So we have people living in urban areas. On theory, most people in Kenya live in urban areas. A lot of people, not most, a lot of people live in urban areas. But in practice, people live in urban areas and have much of their family in rural areas. And so whenever there's a holiday, whenever there's a long break, we have this massive exodus of people from the cities to the countryside. When you have the selection of violence in 2007, people can't physically go to the village. But the people in the village who are dependent on their money, on their food, they can't survive. And so the fact that mobile money was developed in 2006 makes it possible for people in urban areas to maintain that connection with the rural areas. And suddenly mobile money becomes not just this weird quirky thing that 50,000 people are doing, but the main lifeline through which people are able to sustain these connections throughout the three months of upheaval. And then crucially, it's the introduction of technology into politics in Kenya was a deliberate choice. It was not accidental. Because after we had that violence in 2007, we had a peaceful, a peace, I don't want to call it a treaty because a treaty makes it sound like there was a war, but there was a reconciliation process that came up with four different documents, one of which is called the Independent Review Commission, IRAC or the Kregler Commission. And the Kregler Commission explicitly says, let's use computers to restore trust in the electoral process because we've had that 1992 violence, that 1997 violence, it's not getting any better. Maybe computers will fix it. This then becomes the approach that governs how technology is deployed in government in Kenya after that. That is constantly using technology to try and plug in these trust deficits and finding that it's actually not that easy. And sometimes it fails altogether because trust is not something that you build in a machine, it's something that you build in dialogue with your citizens. So we're talking about the election context now, but you think about IFMIS, the Independent Financial Management Information System, which is a platform that's built by USAID, rolled out in multiple countries, but it's supposed to make financial accounting in government transparent. And IFMIS is very expensive. And the previous auditor general in Kenya, his comment on IFMIS was, it is neither independent nor does it help me manage anything because of the extent of manipulation on the platform, because of the way in which people, it didn't change our behavior. In fact, it made accountability even more difficult because people, it became a black box. People didn't know what was going in, they just knew that numbers were coming out and it turned out a couple of months later that the numbers were completely cooked up. And so all of which is by way of context of saying, the 2017 election in Kenya then is a moment to stop and reflect on what's 10 years of having tech deliberately incorporated in politics and public life has actually resulted in. How have we changed as a society? What have we learned? How have we grown? And that's why my book is focused on what I call Kenya's first digital decade, everything that happens between 2007 and 2017, not just at the ballot box, but in politics in the broadest sense of the word, that is to do with the distribution of power within the society between, remember the triangle, how are these three points of the triangle relating to each other and how is it different from what went before? I group these sort of changes into three buckets. Three buckets I call the good, the bad and the ugly because that's it, it's a mixed bag. It's not just been very linear that the tech came and everything was fixed and everyone was happy. When I think about the good, we've had a tremendous increase in demands for accountability from the public and not just towards states, but also towards corporations, but also towards private entities. Social media is a great example of this, but it's not the only example. When I think about the last election, for instance, the difference between the 2007 election and the 2017 election, in terms on the surface, it was almost like the weirdest deja vu. In 2007, I was in my house and the vote was announced and the fires started almost immediately and the upheaval began almost immediately. And same thing in 2017, as the results were being announced and the certificates were being handed out, the gunshots began almost immediately. So it's this terrible sense of deja vu, but what was the big difference? One is in 2007, we almost just had to accept what the electoral commission was doing. It's like, there's not much I can do, power is telling me that this is what happened. But in 2017, we had people go online. There was a hashtag, where is my form 34B? Where people were going on Twitter to say, hey, the result that's on the government website is different from the result that was posted at my polling station. Some things happened here that is not correct. And saying to the state, we're not gonna accept these kinds of manipulations lying down. We also see those demands for accountability vis-a-vis powers like the police and the judiciary. Justice for Khadija, who's a young woman who suffered a domestic violence incident in Northeastern Kenya. And saying to the judiciary, hey, just because she's in a remote part of the country doesn't mean that she can be killed or she can be hurt in such a way and ignored altogether. So we've seen this tremendous rise in demands for accountability. Tied to that is participation. People participating in processes that they previously wouldn't have felt and power to participate in. We have laws on public participation in the government in Kenya, when the government wants to pass a new legislation, they have to have public hearings. And these things tend to be very poorly attended because they put two adverts in the paper and they say, well, we announced it. I don't understand why you didn't want to come. But now what's happening is you have groups like Ms. Alendo and you have groups like civic society groups who only take the adverts and amplify them within their networks, but then they life-tweet the conversation so that people who are online are able to participate and they're able to livestream them. And so even if you can't physically go to County Hall and be part of these conversations, you are able to participate in shaping this legislation in a way that we weren't even able to even five years ago. And a crucial part of this participation is that we're doing it on our own terms. We're seeing people, especially for minoritized groups, people who wouldn't ordinarily have a voice in the public space in Kenya, being able to articulate their presence and being able to tell their story on their own terms. I think the best example of this is LGBTQ plus Kenyans where the traditional media has always sort of excluded LGBTQ plus Kenyans, has always tried to tell the story of it's religiously sort of grounded on exclusion, on these people are not, these are not African values, quote unquote, these people are not our people. But what we've seen is groups that are representing LGBTQ plus people having tremendous space because of tech to be able to say, no, actually we're here and we're part of this country and I'm as Kenyan as you are and I deserve to be represented and included in society on the same terms. The great example of this is a Rafiki ban, with this movie which featured, it's a love story, the two central characters of women who fall in love. And it was banned in Kenya. And then we got a court injunction that suspended the ban for a week. And through the conversations that were had online, the amplification that went on social media, on the dark web, WhatsApp, Signal, everything, there was a lot of hype and a lot of momentum for this film. And by the end of that week, Rafiki ended up being the second most popular film in Kenyan history. Like it sold more tickets than any other film released in Kenya in the previous 10 years. So that's the good. The bad you should all be very familiar with right now, hate speech, for some reason social media and I think the sociology of this is still being explored and it's worth exploring further. It tends to mold itself to our weaknesses as much as to our strengths. And so we've seen an upswing in hate speech against women, against LGBTQ plus people and also based on ethnicity. And it's very difficult for the regulators, the National Courtation and Integration Commission to monitor what's happening on social media because there are a small commission with a big budget but there are small commission that it's very difficult to be everywhere all the time. And in many ways, if people aren't willing to change their behavior, the regulator has to find a way of being everywhere all the time. And they haven't successfully been able to do that in Kenya. Internet shutdowns. We haven't had an internet shutdown in Kenya. We've had cases where people have suspected throttling that deliberately slowing down the speed of the internet so that certain conversations aren't happening quickly. We've had definitely a lot of censorship though. Every time the government has passed a law in Kenya that's supposed to govern hate speech or cyber crimes it's actually instead been used to target critics of the state. So we had the misuse of a communication device law. We have the Cyber Crimes Act. We've had four different instances in the last seven years. Three of those laws have been thrown out for being unconstitutional. The Cyber Crimes Act was not. So it's actually enforced right now. And right now in this moment of COVID-19 it's actually really being tested because the communication that's coming from the government is not coming in. It's not fast enough. It's not packaged properly. You have to wait for the 4 p.m. press conference whereas the incidents are changing every day, every hour, sorry, of every day. And so people are turning online. But what is misinformation and what is releasing information before the government has had a chance to? That's the tension that I think one person has been charged right now. To be fair, he was spreading misinformation. He has a reputation for that. But the fines are steep. And it's just, there's a lot of ambiguity in terms of civil society. What counts as misinformation and what counts as releasing information before the government has had a chance to release information the way that they would have wanted to. That's kind of the ambiguity that we're dealing with the Cyber Crimes Law. And I've mentioned the targeting of women but I wanna put a fine point on this because women are the canary in the coal mine. Wherever you see women not be able to fully participate in the public space it's usually a strong indicator that there's a lot of repression that's happening in other aspects. And that's been the case with social media in Kenya with all of these platforms that women in as much as radical feminists have organized and have been able to find voice the upswing in targeted hate speech against women lists of women who are branded toxic feminists. It's an indicator that there's some tension that in the public space it needs to be resolved. And finally, the ugly and I'm gonna blitz through this because as I said these are issues that as Kenyans we've been thinking about for the last seven, eight years that the West is now starting to think oh maybe we should pay attention to this. When you talk about foreign interference in elections this is something that we've been grappling with for the better part of the last 10 years. I talk about Cambridge Analytica in my book. Cambridge Analytica has been active in Kenya since 2011. They've been active in India since before that. A lot of these things are experimented and tested and tweaked in developing countries which have a much less robust the legislative framework before they're deployed elsewhere. But I don't say that's to mean that they should only be important when they're happening to develop countries. I say that to mean that we have to pay attention to how the intersection between tech and politics everywhere. Ownership is a key issue. Again, I'm thinking about the COVID-19 situation and I'm thinking we're gonna need a bunch of respirators in Kenya soon and we don't make respirators. In fact, nobody in Africa makes respirators and African countries are about to experience this rise in cases. What are we gonna do? When Germany says we're not gonna export any more respirators and China says we can't make them fast enough and the US says we're not gonna make them fast enough. This is an analogy to what's happening in the tech space. African countries aren't building the platforms. We're end users, we're consumers and for many of the platforms, not all of them. And the challenge with ownership then becomes what I said before, how can I as a citizen have my rights and have my interests protected when I don't have any say in directly or indirectly in how these platforms are owned. So I'm gonna leave you with that and a couple of questions. As I said, for me it's not to tell you dogmatically this is what has happened and this is what needs to happen next. Rather for me is to leave you with a couple of things to think about and the provocations for you to take and ruminate over as you think about your own context. And my three questions are these. How do we protect the sanctity of the arbiters? How do we protect the people? When you think about our triangle, we have to think about the lines that connect the different points, the triangle and election context. For example, we're thinking about election commissions where we're thinking about regulators. We're thinking about the legislature. How do we protect the sanctity of the arbiters? How do we keep money in its rightful place so that we prevent this distortion of this balance between the three points of the triangle? How do we make sure that money doesn't displace for example civic interests? How do we make sure that a foreign company, a British company is not able to pay so much money to the Kenyan government that the Kenyan government starts to ignore the interests of the Kenyan citizenry? And finally, how do we recenter the human in our conversations about technology? I think this is the big philosophical question. We've been thinking about disruption and move fast and break things and all of these conversations and slowly and slowly edging humanity out of these frameworks. How do we recenter the human? Because as we've seen again, as I've said in the last this COVID-19 2020 is a wake-up call, a reset call for all of us that we have built all of these systems without people. And now the people really need the systems to work and the systems don't know how to work. So those are my three provocations and thank you for your time. I look forward to answering your questions. Amazing, thank you so much, Nanjala. I'm not gonna applaud for everybody but I think it's the waving of the hands in a way. We've got quite a few questions. I don't know if you can see Slido to answer the questions directly or I can just pick up. The top question and it links into what you were saying at the end is where does accountability lie in regards to political misinformation when you have a British company using an American platform to influence political discourse in Kenya? Because you can identify where the problem lies but how someone in Kenya might hold accountability to an American platform, a British company. How do we resolve those type of issues? Because we all face them at two different degrees. Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's an ongoing question. What I'm leaning towards is thinking about global citizenship and thinking about, well, how can people in the US and the UK be part of the conversation? But you're paying attention to what's happening in Kenya and sort of be that conduit for accountability. I don't know what a global citizenship framework will look like, but for example, what has been happening in Africa is a lot of democracy activists from different national backgrounds have been working together to support and amplify each other's causes. And so to demand, so for example, when Bobby Wein, who's an opposition leader in Uganda was arrested, the biggest number of tweets calling for his release actually came from Kenya because one of the first things that they do is they switch off the internet in Uganda. And so to start thinking about transnational networks of solidarity and accountability within each other, legally it's not been resolved. I mean, there's talk about should we build, like should the ICC have jurisdiction over issues like this? Because the ICC doesn't have jurisdiction of corporations. It has jurisdiction of states. It has jurisdictions over individuals. It does not have jurisdiction of corporations. As an analogy, when it came to mining, there was all of these questions about finance companies and mining companies, American mining companies that were operational in South Africa during their apartheid years. And it was always this thing of how do we keep these guys accountable? Because they're not South African companies. And what's happened in recent years has been the question of universal jurisdiction, that certain crimes are so bad that any country that wants, that has the interest of the capacity should be able to prosecute them. So Belgium became the first country to test this, to do with genocide. It's been an incredibly problematic law. It's been challenged. And I think Belgium had to scale back the universal jurisdiction law. But that's kind of from the legal perspective, that's kind of where the conversation is from a political perspective. For me, I lean towards what does international solidarity look like? Fantastic. And so the next question is from Derek DePriese. And he's asking about how might you measure the balance in the triangle between the corporations and the state and the citizen? How do you feel that balance remains in place, especially as things change? And we're obviously in a fundamental period of change at the moment where that triangle may be getting pretty distorted at the moment. How do you measure that and keep track of that? Yeah, I think, first of all, it's an art and not a science. So we kind of feel it out. But one really strong indicator for me in the last couple of years has been protest. Has been people feeling like they're no longer getting heard through the traditional democratic processes and having to turn to protest. And social media, for example, has become an integral part of the modern protest framework because people are instantly trying to become, build viral protest movements and transnational conversations around that. I think it's one of those things, like I said, a canary in the coal mine. It's easier to tell when things aren't going well than to tell it. If things are going well, you really shouldn't have any people sort of recourse to protest. People out in the streets, people in the courts, in Kenya, the fact that our tech community is constantly in the courts is a sign that something has gone wrong with the way where the state is doing rulemaking and with the power the corporations have. It's about responsiveness at practical terms. The fact that social media companies, for example, have very little actual representation in Africa but are constantly talking about Africa as the next frontier. But it is, this is why for me, I keep coming back to, we need more humanities in the conversation around tech and politics. We need sociologists. We need philosophers. We need literature. We need people who know how to talk about things that cannot be measured. We need them to be in this conversation so we can get better at understanding these things that cannot be measured. Yeah, no, it's a great point, definitely. So the next question is if I'm anonymous. And where's the, it's moved around. So the platforms most accessible to citizens are also the most political and powerful. So how do you see technology, democratize technology that encourages more eco-political participation? Where are you seeing technologies rolling, creating that more eco-participation? So the most interesting, well, some of the most interesting conversations that I've been in the last couple of years have been, is there, can there be a public benefit social platform? Can there be, I don't want to say state owned, but something that's run for the public benefit, is that something that is possible to innovate? Because one of the most common cliches has always been if it's free, that means you're paying for it somewhere else. It means that you're paying for it with your data, you're paying for it with your, you know, attention. But we pay for public goods in other ways of like taxes, very simple. We pay for public goods through taxes, we pay for public goods through, you know, most taxes are the most common way. So I've been in a lot of conversation people have been tossing around this idea. I think it's worth exploring. I think it's important to keep coming back to the fact that social media as a, and all these platforms end to end. It's, we're looking at 20 years. We're not looking at, you know, 500 years of disrupting 500 years of human history. Newspapers have a much longer history. So if we open up this space for this imagination, is that something that's worth exploring? What would a public, a platform run for the public benefit look like? Is it more media than it is networking, take the advertising out of the equation? Like I've seen a lot of people tossing this around. I think it's worth exploring. I personally don't, I don't know, I have to be honest, like, but it's something that's interesting to me for people to explore. I'm certainly one for us to explore over the rest of today and tomorrow. And just one final quick question. You know, in this comes across in the book as well, the fact that citizens in Kenya are seen particularly politically engaged and that's obviously for a number of complex reasons that you describe it. Is that a prerequisite? Do you meet that in other countries? And is it possible to replicate that in other places? Or can we see some of these changes without having, do people need to get political fuss? You know, that's a great question. Because like, for example, in East Africa, we kind of have this disparity. Like Kenyans are super political online. Tens in the end, because there's a lot of state repression, there's a lot of retreat, people tend to go back to like, you know, less harmful things. I think Ethiopia has been a great example of when there was state oppression, people didn't weren't very political online. And now there's no, theoretically, there's no state oppression and there's just this explosion of participation, which suggests that what people need more than being political beforehand is space. What people need is space and comfortable space where they feel like they can speak their political truths without recrimination. Kenya's political presence and participation has its roots in that first decade, that first post-authoritarian decade. And that has everything to do with freedom on the traditional media, that traditional media sort of creating that room that social media then builds on. So I don't think it's a prerequisite. I think more than people being political beforehand is people feeling safe and feeling free to express political opinions, no matter how small without there being this disproportionate states backlash. I feel like that's the lesson from East Africa all together. Fantastic. Manjala, thank you so much. It worked. First talk out of the way, really impressive. Thank you so much as well to everyone for your questions. Audience has no idea how much tension. I think we're all gonna understand the meaning of tension over the next few weeks, that's for sure. So we're gonna take a couple of minutes for a week and then we're gonna start straight back at 2 p.m. And Bec can introduce. We've got Felix and John Olson and Robert Bianson as well. So take a couple of minutes, break, stretch, get a drink of water. Thanks again, Manjala. Hope you'll stay with us. Thank you. I love.