For a much longer time than Americans Africans have viewed fake news as a cancer threatening their societies. Across the continent Africans have experimented with censorship as the remedy.
Fake news and cell phone journalism is my #5 pick for the top stories in Africa in 2016, and I have to admit this is because I’m not African, since I doubt they would put it in the Top Ten. But as an American I’m hopeful we might learn something from them.
Fake news in Africa is perfectly illustrated by an incident in the late 1990s in Kenya. Kenya was a relatively peaceful place during the regime of Daniel arap Moi from 1978 – 2002. EWT’s tourism programs were growing through the roof.
The first half decade of Moi’s lengthy rule was a relatively benign continuation of his predecessor’s quiet dependence on the west, especially America. As the Cold War ended Third World leaders were put on notice that America’s attentions and aid would be reduced. Moi like many other African clients of America reacted by becoming more authoritarian.
By the middle of the 1990s he had clearly turned into a dictator, his legislature rarely passing laws and his judiciary serving entirely at his own discretion. He was neither a benevolent nor malevolent dictator, basically just a benign dictator enriching himself and his extended family at the expense of the country’s development.
In typical self-serving fashion, America (and the west as a whole) pulled back its aid and interests when the Cold War collapsed, complaining that the countries it had propped up with unaccountable aid for decades weren’t democratic. Beginning with Reagan and enhanced by the Clinton administration, African missions in particular were instructed to dole out aid only in return for promises of more democratic policies.
The Clinton State Department forced Moi to hold the first democratic elections in 1997. Nobody liked Moi. He hadn’t been terribly mean, just terribly restrictive, a real burden on the imaginations and creativity of Kenyans. There was no question he would lose.
Why did he win?
America spent millions to promote the election throughout the country. One of the genius ideas was to create radio stations in rural areas that didn’t have them. In those days local languages, however, were all that were spoken, but America said that was OK. We’ll give you the radio station and feed you the news, and you translate.
We have no idea of the body of mistranslated news, but we do have one document that proves fake news: the national ballot.
There were a half dozen candidates, each represented by an animal and color since so much of the population in rural Kenya remained illiterate. Large square boxes as on any ballot preceded the candidate as the option to vote for them.
But in numerous rural radio stations speaking in unrecognized local languages, Moi’s operatives got the presenters to tell people to put an “X” in the box of the candidate that you didn’t want. Guess who got the most X’s? Guess who won?
In 2016 Tanzania continued to issue licenses for new radio stations in rural areas, but the license forbids news presenting in local languages.
During a mini civil war in Uganda in November, a mainstream Kenyan TV journalist documented some of the killing on her phone and was arrested for “abetting terrorism.”
American evangelicals have long run tours in Africa to wring out a few more pennies for themselves from the poor. In September the South African Minister of Home Affairs simply banned one Arizona Baptist preacher from the country.
Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa are each radically different from one another, their citizens enjoying widely different levels of liberty. But in 2016 each one comfortably and without public concern censored what they defined as fake news.
Western societies felt they were immune to fake news, because the veracity of information is thought to be increasingly inviolable as a society grows increasingly literate. Third World societies have only recently emerged from illiteracy, so fake news there is more likely to be believed.
Until now. America has nurtured ignorance over decades of defunding public education and it has empowered those new ignorant classes of people with a democracy easily manipulated by money and fake news. Should we consider the African remedy?
Censor the liberal press !!!!!
Great stuff Jim, keep up the good work
Jim, I don’t want anyone censoring anything. If they could, our new govt would indeed censor any news media they didn’t like. Sounds like a new cabinet position for Bannon. It is a terrible idea.
Never
The only one that should censor my news is me
And the last group to censor news should be the government. They are already to powerful
Do you want Trump to tell you what you can read or hear
Jim, Censorship by the government would violate the US Constitution’s First Amendment, and I think be a bad idea. Perhaps a better idea would be the creation of a ledger listing the times each new sources published fake news (perhaps as a percentage of all business and political news stories by that source). Ultimately the only way to get rid of fake news is to get people to pay no attention to those who repeatedly publish or republish fake news. The other remedy would be suits for libel, or at least viable threats of same including against people who without investigation re-post fake news. Jeff
The “African remedy” doesn’t appear to be much of a remedy for anything. Government censorship is no answer, although Donald Trump would no doubt welcome the opportunity should Congress hand it to him. Unfortunately, the 1st Amendment doesn’t guarantee that everything produced by a free press will be the truth, as social media can well attest. I think we should abandon the term “fake news” altogether. Trump has pretty much defined it as meaning any news that doesn’t suit his definition of the truth, and those on both sides of the political divide use it to describe anything coming out of a news source that’s biased toward the opposition. It means nothing!
Jim, here in the developed world this “fake news” is fed to us mostly via the internet. Each and every time that anyone goes online with any of their internet connected devises, like smart phone, computer, or … toaster, their IP address is recorded along with all available information such as … what sites they visited, for how long, which pages they looked at, etc. In some instances, up to 60 data points are gathered (or mined) from your web site visit. This personal profile data is marketed to advertisers or most recently, to political candidates election teams. Using this personal data modeling, fake news stories are then fed to each and every internet user according to each users likelihood to believe and to pass along these fake news stories. FaceBook, with it’s unchecked public bulletin board format, is the perfect platform to propagate this fake news in. This is how the Trump campaign fueled the bazaar hatred of Clinton and the rest of his campaign’s bullshit. The Koch brothers spent an estimated $165 million over the past 1 1/2 years building a massive personality profile data base. In the last one week of the Trump campaign, they spent close to $5 million targeting the lies to the gullible who wreathe most likely to pass this miss information along. The remedy for for this new fangled high tech propaganda machine is probably a long ways off Trump’s supporters are both dumb and arrogant. They won’t know that they’re taking themselves and rest of us down until it’s too late.