Kenya went into its general election in August 2022 with one of the continent’s most developed networks for countering false information.
After the disputed 2007 vote – when rumours helped drive violence in which more than 1,200 people were killed – a dense network of fact-checkers emerged in the country. This includes organisations such as Africa Check and PesaCheck, backed by newsrooms, civil society groups and big tech platforms.
Fact-checking is the careful work of verifying a claim and publishing a correction if the claim is false. Fact-checkers set as their core mission identifying misinformation (false information shared by people who do not mean to deceive) and disinformation (false information spread on purpose, usually to gain an advantage).
Yet, false claims still saturated the information environment around the vote in 2022. In a survey taken shortly before polling day, 60% of Kenyans said they had come across election information they suspected was deliberately false or inaccurate. Separately, Reuters Institute data found that at least 75% of Kenyan news consumers struggle to tell real from fake news online.
I am a comparative politics scholar who studies how African governments seek to control the flow of information – and how courts, journalists and civil society respond. In a recent paper, I examined the limits of fact-checking during Kenya’s 2022 elections, drawing on practitioner interviews and an analysis of 150 fact-checks.
I argue that fact-checkers...
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