Kenyans sharing inflammatory content via
Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp this election season face a fine of up
to Sh1 million or a jail term of five years if proposed regulations to
police the social media are adopted.
The Communications
Authority of Kenya (CA) and the National Cohesion and Integration
Commission (NCIC) have co-authored the draft rules that would punish
Kenyans for being impolite, disrespectful or inciting violence when
sharing political content.
“All social media content
shall be written using a civilised language that avoids a tone and words
that constitute hate speech, ethnic contempt and incitement to
violence,” say the regulations. “All comments shall be polite, truthful
and respectful”.
Those posting inflammatory content
will face punitive action in line with the NCI Act which stipulates
fines of up to Sh1 million and jail terms of up to five years.
The
regulations also leaves it open for offenders to be punished under a
raft of other laws. Social media users posting political content will
also be required to reveal their identities and any political
affiliations.
This means that bloggers that sharing sponsored content may finally have to unveil their political “godfathers”.
Further, those publishing content on social media will
have to “authenticate, validate the source and truthfulness of their
content”. This, the government says, will forestall the spread of
potentially misleading rumours.
“Content authors shall be committed to honest and correct in their content publishing,” say the draft regulations.
In
cases where social media platforms have administrators, the rules state
that it would be their responsibility to monitor discourse.
The
draft Guidelines for Prevention of Dissemination of Undesirable Bulk
Political SMS and Social Media Content via Electronic Communications
Networks (2017) are an update of similar rules authored in 2012 that did
not take into consideration social media. Kenyans are supposed to
submit their comments on the regulations to the CA before July 04, 2017.
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