 Thank you so much for coming to this book talk, and thank you for making time to come half an hour later. We really appreciate this. Before we start with Njala Nibola, I'm going to do some housekeeping just so we make sure everyone is on the same page. The first is just to let you know that our luncheons are webcast live and recorded for posterity on our website, so just keep an eye out for that. And for people watching remotely, you can ask questions and participate online. Our default is our Twitter handle at BKC Harvard, and we're happy to announce more than one question. One of our mic runners will monitor your questions online for us, so somebody's keeping an eye out for that. I'm going to introduce the guest, and then she's going to start her talk. So what we're going to do is she's going to do her book talk, and then we'll hold off the questions for after the book talk, that's where there's a level of consistency and fluidity in her thoughts, and we do not interrupt that. Now our speaker today is Njala Nibola. I have to give a heads up. I'm a huge fan of Njala's, so I have been hoping to meet her for the longest of times, so if I do get too excited, it's because I'm a fan, and feel free to stop me and just say, dude, you're moving too fast. So Njala Nibola is an aerobic based political analyst, writer, and humanitarian advocate. Njala's accomplished academic career has focused on forced migration in Africa, and includes two master's degrees from the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes scholar. She also holds a JED from HLS, and she was awarded the inaugural Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellowship, designed to amplify the work of women around the world in foreign policy circles, and currently conducts independent research on politics and society in Canaan. Njala has published extensively in academic and non-academic outlets, including opinion pieces and analysis in foreign affairs, foreign policy, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, the BBC Focus on African Magazine, Erin, which used to be owned by the UN, but somebody else bought it, Pombazooka Press, and the Neo-African Magazine. She's a frequent speaker in various conferences around the world, touching on contemporary African politics and society. Njala is the author of Digital Democracy, Analog Politics, the book up here, a book on the impact of the internet in Canaan politics, and we have copies for sale outside for 23 bucks, and this is not in the notes, but Njala is also, at least in my mind, one of the foremost political thinkers and writers of my generation in Kenya, so this is a big, big deal, so welcome, Njala, we look forward to hearing from you. For pressure. Good afternoon, everybody. I just wanted to echo the thanks for accommodating, it was really my late arrival, because I was coming in from New York this morning. I'm still not exactly sure what time it is, so between the daylight savings and the jet lag and all of that, if you told me that it was 2am on Thursday, I believe you, but I'm going to try and be as coherent as I can, and yeah, let's have a good time, right? I wanted to spend some time speaking about the genesis of this project, because this is, to me, beyond a conversation about technology and about Kenya. This was a real political statement of intent on my part. I wanted to do two things. I wanted to do things on a substantive level. I wanted to confront the subject. I wanted to discuss the issues around it, but I also wanted to do things on a political level. And in order to understand the politics and how this book functions as a political statement, it's important for me to share some of the background behind how a person who spends most of their time thinking about refugees and migration ends up writing a book about politics and political science in Kenya. This book has its origins in the 2007 election crisis in Kenya. For those of you who are familiar or unfamiliar, in 2002 Kenya had had a successful election that ended a 24-year-old authoritarian regime. So we were all very excited. In 2005, we had a referendum that brought in a new constitution finally getting rid of the colonial constitution that had been put in place in 1963. So things were on the up and up. Everything was looking like finally we were turning a corner after many years of political uncertainty. So it came as a bit of a surprise that in 2007, the country nearly fell apart. I myself was a third-year student at university. I went home for the first time in two and a half years and I remember we voted peacefully. Voting is never a problem in Kenya. Voted peacefully December 28th. Start counting votes December 29th. And December 29th, we went to bed and the leader of the opposition had almost a million votes to the incumbent and woke up December 30th and that lead had whittled down to less than 100,000, which could happen. Times and whatever, people waking up, votes being counted late, etc. But the curious thing was we had a number of constituencies, both in the opposition and in the ruling party zones, returning results of 110% voter turnout, 101% voter turnout. And I'm assuming everybody here already knows that's not how percentages work when it comes to voting. And the irregular results were all playing out on national television. We were all tuned in, wrapped, wondering what the hell does this mean? Where I lived right next to an informal settlement. December 30th meant going to bed with an orange glow on the horizon. Because that's when the fires started, people started setting fire to their neighbors' homes and to their communities in retributive attacks. And that feeling in your pit of your stomach of not knowing, is this how it ends? Is this having studied, having looked at conflict around the world? At the time, I was writing a dissertation about the war in Liberia, which dragged on for the better part of 30, 40 years. Wondering, is this how Kenya ends? Thankfully it wasn't. We lost 1,500 people, over 100,000 people were displaced, many are still displaced. But it's set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the 2017 election. And that's why this book is really, it's bracketed by these two elections. The 2007 election, the 2017 election, which I call Kenya's first digital decade. As part of the peace settlement that came from that 2007 election, there was a question of transparency. If people could trust the system more, if people could believe in elections more, maybe they would be less inclined to protest, to take to the streets every time an election gets announced. Keep in mind that Kenya had had a violent election in 1988, in 1992, in 1997. The real difference with 2007 was that for the first time Nairobi was part of the problem, and Mombasa was part of the problem, that these main urban centers were in the middle of the crisis. That meant that for the first week of January 2008, for example, there was no food or water going in and out of most of the suburbs of Nairobi. We stood in line for three hours to buy sugar, to buy a sidebar. Every time there's a crisis in Kenya, we buy sugar. And you think to yourself, that's not really a priority thing. But it's a really strange thing that we always do, that we always stockpile sugar. But we stood in line for three hours to buy one packet of sugar and one loaf of bread, all the major food markets in Nairobi and the central business district, which was cordoned off for four days. Nobody was going in or out. On a personal level, I do recall also that there was this moment when after a number of days of the Kibera crisis, this is the informal settlement. A number of people left the settlement and tried to protest. They were marching on the street. They were waving white t-shirts and white handkerchiefs. And they were saying, please let us out, please let us out. We have no food, we have no water, we need to be able to eat, let us out. And they were saying this in Kiswahili. And there was a CNN anchor who was standing in front of the crowd saying, these guys are upset because their chosen candidate didn't win the election. And I was livid, I was furious at this narrative that was being built around what was really a humanitarian crisis being turned into some kind of political, vengeful moment. And that really is the incident that set me off on a writing career. Op-eds, academic articles, everything kind of for me starts from that moment. For Kenya, it then becomes, how do we build trust in these systems that have been so thoroughly decimated by this charade really of an election? Whereby the president had to be sworn in at 9.30 PM in the absence of anybody else except his own party members. How do we move past that? It began with a number of commissions, one of which is for commissions and one of which is known as the Independent Review Commission or IREC. Commonly known as the Kregler Commission. And the Kregler Commission was asked to look into the process of voting and the process of electioneering in Kenya to come up with recommendations to make the system more transparent, more trustworthy. And this is where the technology piece came in, because they concluded that one way to do that in Kenya would be to computerize the elections, that if we just throw technology at this problem, suddenly everything, not suddenly, but eventually things would be better. So here we are, myself and my country on these parallel trajectories over the next 10 years, thinking about witnessing all of these interesting collisions, all of these moments of transformation, all of these, some of them are quite fantastic. Some of them, you know, if you work at the Berkman Client Center, you would be familiar with Ushahidi, which comes from a blog post, which comes from, you know, again, the election period. Whereby, Orio Collo, who's a former student here at HLS as well, goes on her blog post, she's a popular blogger at this point and says, if only there was some way that we could keep track of atrocities of acts as they were happening and put them on the map so that emergency services could know how to respond. And then, you know, Eric Hurstman, Daudi Ware, jump in on this and it turns into this crisis mapping app, Ushahidi. There's a story there as well. And then on the part of the media, because why was the main source of information during this period, CNN and the BBC? Why not the Kenyan media, which is on the ground and arguably should have the resources? That's the story of censorship. That's the story of both self-censorship and censorship from the press. That's the story of state capture. That's the story of intimidation. That's the story of journalists going missing, or disappeared, brown envelope journalism. It's really about how one of the most vibrant media spaces in the developing world, in Africa certainly, is both forcefully constrained, but also gives up territory for its own economic survival. It's worth noting that the most widely read newspaper in Kenya, Daily Nation, is the most widely read newspaper in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has a circulation of over 2 million. At its peak, it was, I think, 2.9 million a day. What happened? Why is the circulation in the, well, in the toilet right now? Well, part of it comes again from the 2007 crisis. From a refusal, in the advent of the referendum, the press had been incredibly critical of the government. And one of the narratives that came from 2007 was that this hypocriticism is part of the reason why there was violence. So if the press could just be less critical of government, less critical of the state, then there would be less political violence in Kenya. And so it becomes this, first of all, this willful seeding of space. But at the same time, the state sees this willful seeding and grabs whatever space is left. You have laws that are passed that threaten enormous fines for misrepresenting information, for what you would call today fake news. That's a very loaded term. But today in Kenya, if media outlets reports, for example, election results that are not confirmed by the government, by the Independent Election Boundaries Commission, they face fines of up to US$50,000, so about 5 million shillings. So people have become incredibly cautious about crossing the state. But also the biggest advertiser in all of these media outlets is the state. So when they want favorable coverage, they offer money. When they want to punish the media outlets for unfavorable coverage, they withdraw their advertising. And you're talking about millions of shillings every day, because nobody else can really afford to take out 1 million shilling adverts to congratulate the president on the occasion of the 53rd independent celebration in Kenya, which happens a great deal. So all of these things to me collide to tell an interesting story about how an unexpected place, an unexpected corner of the world, becomes a lightning rod for some of these global trends in technology, in media, in society. And that's the story that I'm trying to tell in this book. It's the story of how people use platforms that are built, not necessarily with them in mind, to redefine their societies, to redefine their community. But it's also a story about how the state as an actor uses its agency to both oppress and to enable. How does this duality within the state itself that it wants to appear modern, it wants to appear progressive, it wants to be brand silicone savanna, but at the same time wants to build one of the most elaborate surveillance systems, citizen surveillance systems that we've ever seen. As I speak to you now in Kenya, there is a project that's rolling out called the National Information Integrated Management System, NIMS. I as an adult Kenyan have a driver's license number, I have a birth certificate, I have a passport, I have an NSSF number, I have an NHIF number, I have an ID card, I have a tax pin number. Each of these is a different database that's administered by the state. They're rolling out yet another database whereby we were given, we were told on February 17th that between February 18th and March 18th every adult citizen had to go and register, and non-citizens actually, had to go and re-register again to be issued with a card and a number. The question that comes to mind is obviously I already have an ID card. That's what the ID card is supposed to be, and if you really wanted to integrate all of these databases you would just integrate all the databases. Why do I need to line up for 30 days? Why do you need to threaten to withhold key services from me if I don't take part in this activity? This is of course, for me, a great personal concern because I'm not going to be in the country during the required period. But we were told if you don't register for your NIMS number, you will not be able to renew your passport, you will not be able to get a driving license, you will not be able to access free healthcare, you will not be able to access any government services. Why is the Kenyan government so keen to build an elaborate surveillance system when it's unable, for example, to follow through on its promises for free education, free healthcare, free maternal healthcare? These are some of the questions that I'm trying to grapple with in this book. I think that if I had said that I was writing a book about technology and had put the United States at the center of that conversation, nobody would question it. There's this presumption that when we talk about tech and we talk about digital spaces that in the West, the standards or the opinions or the perspectives or whatever that's established in the West is the norm around the world. And I wanted to push back a little about that. I wanted to put an African country at the center of the narrative. And you would be surprised at how much pushback. Well, if you study African studies, you wouldn't. You'd be surprised at how much pushback there was to this idea. My least favorite question, why didn't you write an Africa book? It's going to take a lot to drag you away from me. It's burned in my brain. Every time someone says Africa, that's the song that plays in my head. Why don't you write an Africa book? Because, you know, there's something similar happening in Zimbabwe. There's something similar happening in Sudan and there's something similar happening in the Congo. Here's the thing. One of the conversations I have in this book, for example, is about how radical feminists are using social media to build new movements and new conversations that are pushing back against the institutionalized, the state capture of institutional feminist movements and the patriarchy in which they have to conduct their work. I go into histories about how women are intimidated in occupying public space in Kenya. It begins with the story of a woman who gets beaten and stripped for refusing to sell a man, a boiled egg for 20 shillings. Would I have been able to tell that story if I had been writing about Africa? Would I have been able to really get into the reads of these key changes if I had not allowed myself to leave the macro plane and really start to get into the history and the politics and the society of one specific country? This is what I was saying in the beginning about how this book is both a political statement and a substantive one, that I think we have to allow countries all around the world to have their specific histories. And we have to allow people space to create space for people to tell their stories on their own terms. It's easy to assume that because what we saw in the US election on social media, how social media interacted with the US election in 2016 or the Brexit vote, that that is how social media plays out all around the world. And I will tell you that there are problems and I'm going to go into one of the things that I really hardpoint about in this book or really dwell on in this book. But at the same time, how would I be able to tell you about people who went to their polling stations to take pictures of the official results of the results that were posted there to challenge the narrative that was coming from the Independent Election Boundaries Commission, the KOT election observer mission, which basically is a number of people who are on Twitter who said whatever they're putting on that website is not what came up on my polling station. And that's their position, picking up on these things goes and says, you know what, we actually need to file a lawsuit. Countries are entitled to their own histories. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to capture here. Let's see Kenya on its own terms and within the context of its own histories and see how these very global issues are playing out at a local level. I want to emphasize at this point that this is not a book about technology. Wait, Nangala, but this is the Berkman Klein Center. What, we came all this way to talk about tech? No! Calm down. This is not a book about technology. This is a book about people. This is a book about how people are using technology to tell different stories. This is about a book about how people are using technology to redefine their communities. The central theme for me in this work really is agency. It's really looking at both citizens and the state and asking the question, how do we make these things work for us or not work for us? How do people respond to changes that are really outside their control? It's a conversation about politics in an African country that doesn't dwell on the elite level politics. Yeah, I'm talking a lot about elections, but I'm not just concerned about the politicians and I'm not just concerned about what they're fighting about. I'm thinking about voters. I'm thinking about coalitions. I'm thinking about people setting up parallel tallying centers using the data that is available online. And why does this matter? From an African studies perspective, we tend to focus so much on what powerful people are doing. And in the process, the story of African politics becomes the story of power. And people begin to lose the ability to see themselves as active agents. Kenyans, right now, when you talk about politics, it's very difficult for people to see how they can do anything to make things different because there's Raila and there's Uhuru Kenyatta and they're fighting and we just have to wait until the fighting ends or keep our heads down so that we don't get any of the secondary spillover. It's a disempowering discourse when we just focus on elite level politics and we lose sight of how citizens are also part of the story. My central question was how do ordinary people experience politics in Kenya? Again, starting with my own experience. Starting with myself as a year old, sitting in my house, watching the horizon turn orange and wondering, what is my place in all of this and how can I exercise my agency in this and how can other people exercise their agency in this? Or do we just have to wait for, to use a Kiswahili proverb, do we just have to wait for the elephants to finish fighting? Another theme that is really central to this book is change and how we miss a lot of important subtle moments of change again if we remain on the macro plane. Now this is a really interesting one for me. It was an interesting experience for me because I wrote the book in a somewhat chronological order except for the last, it is somewhat in chronological order but I wrote the last two chapters after the 2017 election and people who have read it and who know me and who can tell, it's a very conversational style. They say, you know what, you seemed really happy in the beginning and you seemed really bummed at the end and it's fair because I was really bummed towards the end because I had expected things to be a little bit more, given all the changes that I had seen over the 10 years and documented and researched and talked to people about. I had expected 2017 to go a little bit differently. I didn't expect on August 11th, 2017 to be doing exactly the same thing that I had been doing in August, in December, 2007. Sitting in my house, listening to gunshots in a informal settlement in the distance, watching a president, an election get announced in the middle of the night, 9.30 p.m. How could I have been doing exactly the same thing that I was doing 10 years prior? And yet, in the interim, we had seen the advent of the so-called Silicon Savannah. We had seen people, mobile money, Kenya become the world leader in mobile money. At this particular point, mobile money transactions in Kenya in 2016, at least, amounted to the equivalent of one third of GDP. We had seen, arguably, a digital election with all of its problems, the most expensive election in the world. We had seen all of these things done to change the trajectory, the political trajectory of the country. And I was still doing the same thing. So when grappling with this theme of change, I'm both grappling with what did change and what didn't change. Why we got stuck on this hamster wheel of political activity in Kenya? Why we were still having the same debates, albeit on a different platform? What local language radio had done in 2007, the internet was now threatening to do in 2017. The platforms had changed. Had the discourse changed enough for things to be different? Some of the questions that I'm trying to deal with. And the last theme that I really hope that you get from the book is connection. As I said, it's really interesting to me that you can write a technology book about the United States. Without necessarily even using the phrase United States. And people would just assume that that's the truth about how tech works everywhere. And yet here I was fighting editors and reviewers and everybody to say, well, actually, things might be a little bit different where we are. I wanted to connect the story of Kenya to not just the story of Africa, but to the story of the world. And one key thing is, for example, the influence of global capital on Kenyan elections. Everything that you guys are freaking out about now with Cambridge Analytica and with Russians, we freaked out about in 2013. So we're trendy. We were ahead of the curve. Cambridge Analytica was active in Kenya from 2013, was active in India from 2011. These analytics from both the government and the opposition both ran massive elaborate analytics operations to mine social media information to frame their political campaigns. We had the average, one study estimated that the average political candidate, presidential political candidate in Kenya spends 50,000 US dollars on their campaigns. So about 5 million chillings. Privacy International found that the Jubilee administration, which is the current ruling party in Kenya, spent 60,000 US dollars on Cambridge Analytica alone. How would the world look like if we had paid attention to what was happening in this unexpected corner of the world? How different would our conversations have been if we had been listening to people, again, speaking on their own terms? The red flags about spending on social media and about how PR companies were influencing political discourse in Kenya, as I said, we've been grappling with since 2013. We had two people facing indictment at the International Criminal Court running for office with a charge of crimes against humanity on their backs. How did they go from being the accused to being the liberators from the ICC which is here to pursue a Western colonial agenda? How did that narrative flip? It was PR. It was a massive elaborate investment in British and American PR and analytics companies that conducted, for example, Cambridge Analytica conducted a survey of 47,000 Kenyans that we didn't know about until 2017, at least in the general, in the public domain. It was in the public domain until 2017. And there was very little regulation around that. So I wanted to center Kenya and Kenyan stories so that we can start to ask ourselves as global capital, as American corporations, because let's be honest, a lot of these are American corporations, even though there are some British corporations and German corporations that are, the election database in Kenya was built by a French company. As Western global capital begins to profiteer or continues to profiteer off of political crises in the rest of the world, shouldn't we be paying more attention to these connections? Shouldn't we be paying more attention to the fact that Kenya's election database lives in Paris? There are 19.2 million registered voters in Kenya in the last election. And as I've mentioned, there was an election dispute. The opposition went to court. And this is the part where you think I'm gonna talk to you about hacking. Because that's what everybody thought they were gonna do. They had been making allegations of hacking on social media, allegations of hacking on that the election servers had been hacked and hacked and hacked. Here's the interesting thing about that election database. One is, it is a commercial product. That it is possible to buy electoral data from the IEBC in Kenya. The political candidates buy that information, can get your phone number, can get your physical address, can get your fingerprints, data. They can call you and ask you, you registered to vote in this constituency, why didn't you vote there again? Why? Because Kenya doesn't have a data privacy law. It's open season on any of these databases that are being built and created right now. That's one thing. So the opposition bought their copy of the electoral register. They also built their server, allegedly. I have to say allegedly because I have a law degree and this is where it came from, so don't sue me. No, allegedly they built their own database and had been keeping track of the results as they were coming in, ready to dispute them when the official result, they started just the vote closed, the voting closed on August 8th. They started disputing them on August 9th. Hacking was the main theme. They hacked, they hacked, they hacked. Strangely enough, when the opposition filed their case of the Supreme Court challenging the presidential results, they never made allegations of hacking. Why? Because to prove that the database had been hacked, they had to have hacked the database themselves. And that was, they didn't want to get caught, arguably. I mean, that's the next level of speculation for me is that how would you, how would you, they had been saying that they had proof that the database had been hacked and everybody asked them, well, how did you know? How did you get into the database to figure out that it had been hacked? What they did argue was that the official results were not correct. And they demanded an audit of the service as part of their case. So there was this very surreal moment where the opposition, the lawyers in court and they say, we need you to open the service. It's become a running joke in Kenya, Fungua Service, which means open the service. Every time a result is in dispute, Fungua Server. And the lawyer for the government says, your honor, we can't open the service because the servers are in France and the people in France are asleep. This is the largest, second largest database of adult Kenyans that exists. And we can't have it accessible on demand during the most pivotal legal proceeding in the country's history. What does that mean about the reach of Western capital, global capital into African politics? And it gets worse during the court proceedings. As a recovering lawyer, I'm embarrassed by how much time I spent watching those that case, but it was delightful. It was highly entertaining. There was a moment when the lawyer for the independent election boundaries commission was face to face with the Supreme Court justices. And he says, my lords, my ladies, I urge you to ignore the results that were being transmitted on the results transmission system, the website that had been built for this reason. And the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice in Kenya is a very quiet man. He doesn't say very much in court, but he does that thing, people who wear glasses know what I'm talking about. You know, when you look at people over your glasses, and you're like, I'm judging you. And he looks over his glasses and he says, if they were not official results, what were they? And the lawyer says, they were just statistics. This is the most expensive election per capita in world history, $28 per head. An average election, for example, in India costs between $5 and $6 per head. India has the largest election in the world, right? And we were being told to ignore those results because they were just statistics. What does it mean when the IBC disavows its own system? To me, the red flags on this issue could not be brighter. The influence of Western capital on politics around the world is going to be a major problem moving forward. We talked about it in Kenya, and we talked about the influence of Cambridge Analytica and the influence of Harris Media, which is a Texas-based company, BTP Partners, which is a British PR company, and how they were able to spin local politics in order to enhance the image of the ruling party. My theory is that we got away with it just by the skin of our teeth in Kenya because the thing that we fight most about in Kenya, which is ethnicity, is very difficult to capture through software. For example, my surname, as a Kenyan, I can generally guess what a person's ethnicity is by their surname, by where they were born, even sometimes by which football team they support, although that's not a 100% predictor. But there's a lot of, what do they call them, false friends. My surname doesn't belong to the ethnic group that I belong to, and so people always guess wrong. And I don't have a lot of data, as a person who was born and raised in Nairobi, Nairobi's a cosmopolitan town. It's very difficult to narrow down on what my ethnic group could be. I believe that things like this are the reason why it's been very difficult to turn election, social media data, data that's on this as public impact that is used for these analytics operations into something that can be weaponized. Nigeria didn't get away with it so easily. Nigeria, the thing that they fight about most is religion. And religion is much easier to pick out in this particular context. And Cambridge Analytica worked in the 2015 Nigerian election, and painted Muhammad Dubehari, who ended up winning the election as a Muslim extremist, that he was going to impose Sharia law in Nigeria, it's about 50-50 Muslim Christian, that he was going to incite religious warfare on the continent, in the country. And for what? For a quick buck, for profits, to satisfy the shareholders, to turn a profit. This is an issue that we're increasingly going to grapple with. Technology is the new frontier for what I call digital colonialism. The use of Western corporations to project the power, economic power from one part of the world into the other part of the world. I'm not gonna give away too much about the book because I do want you to buy it. I think it's good, I know the author, I'm biased. But I wanted to leave you with those thoughts, and if you'd permit me, I just wanted to read a little bit so that you can have a flavor of the kind of book it is. It is an academic book. It's done in academic style, but it's written in a very conversational tone because I strongly believe that these conversations need to leave the academy. I strongly believe that ordinary people need to be aware that when they put information on social media, it's not just your friends looking at the pictures of your food, that there's so much going on that we have to pay attention to. And I say this as a person who loves social media. My Instagram is popping, but I'm biased again because I'm the one who runs it. But with a consciousness. I mean, in operating environment now where the people who have their awareness are so hyper aware, but the vast majority of people in the world don't even have a basic awareness. Cannot even discern the difference between a news site and a propaganda site. And to me, one of the moments in which this really was brought home was again during the 2017 election. And I was talking to a friend of mine who had gotten most of the political information from WhatsApp. And we had been talking about how the election was gonna go and it got into a little bit of a back and forth. And I said, no, as she said, but I heard that if Rayla wins the election, he's going to round up all of the Kikuyu's, her ethnic group and have them killed. And I said, where did you hear that? It was on WhatsApp. And the challenge of democracy is we all consume the same information even if we come to disparate conclusions about it. We're all reading from the same baseline information and processing it differently. That's fine. What will democracy look like when everybody is reading different types of information? When I can't see what political information you're consuming. How will we be able to have a constructive political conversation if we're not even reading from the same script? Once again, Kenya has a history of this. As I mentioned in 2007, the culprit was local language radio. Before 2002, there was only one radio broadcaster in Kenya, KBC. We also had the BBC World Service and the OA sort of broadcasting into the country. After we liberalized the broadcast signals, we ended up with a hyperfragmentation of the radio space especially and people started to broadcast in local languages, which nominally, and I still do think this is a good thing in terms of preserving language, but what ended up happening? Today we have 178 radio stations in Kenya. 78% of Kenyan households have radios. But the regulator does not have the capacity to keep up with what's happening all of those radio stations. And so people spend months, years, hearing all of this hate speech really, and the regulator has no idea what's happening until the killing starts. That's what happened in 2007. That's why one of the Indities of the ICC for Crimes Against Humanity was a radio presenter. Because for years he had been telling people in his ethnic group that the Ku Klux are coming. You have to defend yourself. You have to protect yourself. You have to protect your family. In 2017, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, the NCIC, did a survey on hate speech in Kenya. And they found that the number one purve of hate speech in Kenya was not Facebook, was not Twitter, was a local language radio station known as Kameh FM, which is owned by Media Max, which is owned by the president of the Republic of Kenya. And this raised a lot of questions about money and power and influence, and how it shapes how we consume, produce political information. Having said that, a 2013 study from I Hub, which gave us Oshahili, found similar patterns of hyper-segmentation of news information on Facebook. Making Facebook also one of the sites where hate speech is very common. Much more common than on semi-public sites like LinkedIn, Twitter. Much more common than you would see on these other sites. All of which is to say, what happens on the other side of the world matters. It might not matter to you today. It might not matter to you tomorrow, but it matters. And as we are becoming much more connected and multinational corporations become part and parcel of not just of our social but our political and economic conversations, we have to make much of an effort to understand what's happening in each other's lives. It doesn't matter just because it happened in the US in 2016. It matters because everybody on the other side of these statistics, 1,500 people killed, is a person who belongs to other people who is part of our community. So I'm going to leave you with a little bit of a taste. What's the position on swearing? OK. OK. Because I swear a lot. Here we go. It began with a rumor. Late on the night of Sunday the 3rd of April 2016, messages tore through Kenya's numerous WhatsApp groups that one of the country's best known mid-sized banks, Chase Bank, was in trouble. By Tuesday 5th April, the news had leapt onto Twitter. User Moombi Saraki tweeted, after Imperial, CBK, Central Bank of Kenya, focused on forensic audits and found similar alleged fraud at Chase Bank, where close to 15 billion is missing from the books. Each of the 14 tweets responding to Saraki demanded evidence and called on her to prove her allegations, with some going as far as inviting Chase Bank to prosecute Saraki for allegedly defaming the bank. Even though Saraki is a relatively well-known personality, the initial instinct was to disbelieve her, because Chase Bank was no small outlier bank. Unaffiliated with the US Bank of the same name, the Kenyan Bank was incorporated in 1995 as a mid-sized bank, primarily serving low-income earners, small and medium-sized enterprises, and other underserved communities. It had one of the largest Sharia-compliant banking units in the region, and served many businesses in Kenya that traded primarily with the Middle East. At its peak, Chase Bank was one of the most successful indigenous banks in the largest banking sector in East Africa. Fear of a bank collapse was close to many people's minds as Kenya's bank sector was in flux in 2016. A few months earlier, Imperial Bank, another indigenous mid-sized bank, had gone under, owing to fraud and mismanagement, taking with it millions of shillings of customers' money. A long-running expose by Kenyan writer and blogger Owa revealed the extent of the rot at Imperial. A conspiracy by the bank's managing director against the bank and its depositors that went all the way up to the governor of the central bank of Kenya. In one of the most shared blog posts of the year, the blogger laid out the guts of the Imperial Bank saga, pointing out the complete erosion of systems of accountability, rampant systemic corruption, and the abandonment of depositors once the rot was exposed. The blog post was so popular that the mainstream media, which had been ignoring the story up to this point, finally followed up with their own expose. Some Facebook posts alleged that major depositors heard about the Chase Bank rumor prior to the Twitter revelations and immediately withdrew their money. For the majority of customers, however, the first sign that something was truly wrong didn't come until Syracuse Tweet on 5th April. Chase Bank's social media accounts were running as normal. Users frantically tagged the bank in Syracuse Tweet, urging them to respond. The people managing the bank's social media urged customers to ignore the rumors. That information is completely false and we urge the public to ignore it. The bank drafted and issued a press statement asserting that Chase Bank was, quote, strong, sound, and transparent. 48 hours later, on 7th April, 2016, Chase Bank was under receivership, taken over by the central bank, with all of its accounts frozen and the CEO and managing director suspended pending investigations. Customers who went to branches in the morning found the doors locked, heavy steel chains wrapped around the sparkling chrome door handles, knotted together by angry iron padlocks. Every branch had a notice posted above the locks announcing that the bank was closed until further notice. Some customers hopped online to try and access their accounts with no luck. The bank's online banking site was down. Staff members suffered the double burden of having to explain a situation that they didn't understand, but were also directly affected by, through the closure, were also directly affected by, through the closure themselves, due to the requirement that they have accounts with the bank so that their salaries could be paid into them. Crowds gathered at the bank branch entrances, waiting and hoping that someone would come out and say something, but no one did. For the next week, Chase Bank would remain closed. I rate customers probably feeling unheard as the official communication was slow in coming, took to social media to express their frustration. For those who weren't customers, it gave insights to the scale of the loss. It was the first week of the month. Bills, rents and salaries were due. Some people had lost everything. There were tweets about having to beg landlords for more time. Others wondered what to do about school fees and school supplies that were due soon. For one person, it was all too much. Fuck you, Chase Bank. He or she wrote in permanent marker across the glass doors of the banks branch in the Nairobi Central Business District. The picture was loaded onto Twitter and Facebook and quickly went viral. Another user tweeted, fuck Chase Bank, fuck Chase Bank. Directors, fuck whoever who knew what was going on and decided to keep quiet. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Chase Bank was dying and taking entire lives down with it. But unlike Imperial Bank, much of the country now had a front row seat to the carnage. So who tried to kill Chase Bank? I'm gonna leave you there. Thank you. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Nangela. I think what we're gonna do is, in the interest of time, take questions from everyone. Because like I said, if I said we won't end and I have the same last name Kananjom as well where nobody can place me. So that's a whole dissertation topic in and of itself. So I think we could start with questions. There should be mics going around. We'll start with Yvonne back there and move this way. I haven't entirely framed the question in my mind yet. But you've identified two different massive sets of problems. The data colonialism problem led by the social media companies. And then the other problem of, in particular, local radio, stoking, violence, rumor, whatever. So does your book suggest some recommendations on how to deal with those? And I'm trying to think about how they might relate to each other or counter each other. Or is one part of the solution of countering the other? Right, that's a great question. I'm still my friend. One of my favorite questions that I've had in sort of going around with this book is what didn't make it into the book? And this is one of the conversations that didn't make it into the book. Because, literally, I just run out of space. But I do have a conversation about this in the MIT Tech Review from the fall of 2017, where I really tried to go into this particular, this very issue. Because I do think that paying attention to what happened in Kenya with local language radio in 2007 can give us a starting point for thinking about how to deal with what's happening with politics and social media today and how this hyper stratification of political information can become a problem and how we actually have to pay attention to it and we can fix it. In the Kenyan context, what has happened is a lot of self-regulation and raising of the standards of local language radio. Not as high as I would like for it to be because, again, as I mentioned, the people who are profiting the most from this ecosystem are the people who have interests in power or access to power. The people who own radio stations are all powerful politicians, are mostly powerful politicians. But there has been a lot of standard setting and a lot of increased regulation in this particular space because of what happened in 2007. The similarities to me is it took us from a position where we were all consuming the same political information, like if you buy a newspaper, if you watch a national television broadcast and took us to a position whereby people were consuming information in silos that we could not listen in. And that has to me a lot, it's very similar to what's happening on Facebook. There was a Pew Center study that found that the vast majority of people who are getting political information, vast majority of people who are on, I have the statistics in the book, people who are on Facebook are more likely to talk to only people that they know. Whereas people who are on Twitter, for example, are talking to people that they don't necessarily know and less likely to just be talking to people that they already agree with. To me, I see these parallels between people who consume news from the national broadcaster and people who only consume information that's coming from a local language radio broadcast. They're not, we're not reading from the same script, we're not consuming the same information. And as a final point, I would say, this also gives us a hint to where dark social and the influence of dark social WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram is going to be moving forward. And we saw this in Brazil that WhatsApp had an outsize impact on the Brazilian election last year and people were consuming a lot of information anti-LGBTQ information, anti-black information and shaping how political, political behavior towards the, or against the candidate that ended up losing the election. So for me, that's kind of, that's the connection and that's something that we need to be paying much, much more attention to on a regulatory level. I have to say at this point, I do think there has to be more regulation. I'm not sure that the Kenyan government is the best person that you should be taking regulatory advice from. But I want us to open up the space for that conversation. I want this experience, the experience of me and Mar with Facebook, the experience of India, also with Facebook and political messaging to be on the table when we talk about what regulating social media is going to look like moving forward, because we've been through these things, not just with social media, but also with other platforms in heightened political social contacts. We had a hand raised at the very front here. During your talk, I heard you mentioned Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, these are all companies that are not located in Kenya. Indigenous companies running social media services that people could use instead of these? No, and this is something that I, there's a wonderful young lady in Nigeria called Andara Mola who's exploring, who's been trying to build an African social networking site. And I think she deserves to be supported and she needs to be helped with this, precisely for this reason. But Africa's huge, that's not necessarily what's negative. That's absolutely true, but it's much better than what we have now, which is the fact that if Congress, there's so much activism, and I go into some detail in the book, there's so much political and social activism that's moving to social media in Africa. So movements like Balaisitwayan, which was part of the Senate, the Burkina Bay, they ended a 27 year old dictatorship. It was a youth led protest and social media was a big part of that. Burkina Faso Senegal with Yonmaré, DRC with Lucha Ardissay, Togo with Faroe Must Go, Roads Must Fall in South Africa. There's so many youth led movements for whom social media is becoming an integral part of their practice. And that has had really good outcomes in some respects. But then you are left with the question that these are American companies. What happens? No, what happens if the US Congress changes the regulations in such a way that they're not able, or what do they stop existing? We are on third generation social networking sites. Anybody here still use their MySpace account? Frensta? High five, right? There's no guarantee that social networking sites are going to look the same way today, 10 years from now. So are we thinking about what it means for so much political activism to move onto sites that might not exist five years from now? I don't know. We'll take the last question as we move to that. There's always also the issue and I keep saying this, right? Well, we're trying to solve Facebook now. We've kind of failed on that. It's like I study genocides, right? Well, you're trying to end this conflict. We've already failed. That's a signal about failure. And we need to think about 10, 20 years down the line. What are the rules going to be? What can the rules look like? And can we frame those rules now, right? Rather than waiting for the next person from Bahá'u'll to do this and all of a sudden we're talking to him as a Harvard undergrad in his dormitory rather than somebody that runs a multi-billion, multi-national company, right? And those things we need to deal with and that's part of the problem. So last question. Thank you for the illuminating talk. My question is somewhat related to the previous question. You mentioned the national database or also the ID card and so on. I would be curious, is it known what company is behind it? Is it, again, like a? Mastercard, sorry? Mastercard, no. Mastercard. So I have to say that with a pinch of salt. The government says that it's not Mastercard, but they did this in Nigeria as well whereby they introduced this new identity card that's linked to a payment system. The idea is to link it to a payment system and the payment system is built by Mastercard. That platform already exists. You have to understand a little bit about the Kenyan bureaucracy to understand why it matters that the same agency is the one that's administering both of these initiatives. They've been, the government has come out and said it's not going to be Mastercard. You know that thing you said about the cameras and recording for posterity? I have to be very careful about what I say, but it's definitely not a Kenyan corporation. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. As before the camp kicked us out of this room, I think what we'll do is we'll end this session and then maybe Njala can take questions and conversations later on. Thank you so much, Njala. And the books as well. They're actually relatively cheap, 23 bucks. So please get the book. Njala, thanks for a phenomenal conversation. Thanks for a phenomenal book. Thank you. And thank you as a sociologist. Thank you for bringing in sociology into this because it always excites me when I see a sociologist or sociological terms being used in books. So thank you so much, Njala. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.