Mr Odinga. He says Harris Media and Cambridge Analytical were no different. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga has,
for the first time, reacted to apocalyptic campaign adverts ran against
him in the 2017 campaigns, saying it depicted him as the “devil
incarnate.”
The videos and the
divisive campaigns that reportedly started in 2013 have since been
linked to British firm Cambridge Analytica and Harris Media, with the
former said to have mined personal information from social media giant
Facebook to craft and target personalised messages at voters.
INTERNET
In
an interview with British Channel 4 TV, the station that exposed the
data firm bragging to its undercover reporter of having fixed the Kenyan
elections for President Uhuru Kenyatta in both 2013 and 2017, Mr Odinga
said he will sue both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
“I
am disappointed that Facebook agreed to cooperate in this clandestine
enterprise. I have been very disappointed, and we are actually
contemplating legal action against Facebook. . . We will do it outside
Kenya with Kenyan lawyers and others from outside,” he told Channel 4
News, calling for legislation to stop such further infringement in
Kenya.
On whether he will also sue Cambridge Analytica, he answered in the affirmative, saying “most certainly.”
Mr Odinga, who was speaking for the first time
about the allegations levelled against the British firm, which it has
denied, said the company took advantage of the impressive internet
penetration statistics in Kenya.
“The
Real Raila Odinga in those videos was a very evil man. . . The devil
incarnate,” Mr Odinga told the British station in an interview aired on
Monday night.
JUBILEEE
The
‘Real Raila’ videos, which depicted Mr Odinga as violent, incapable of
leading, and a man who should not be allowed to lead, were made by
Harris Media, a report by Privacy International had said last year.
In the interview, Mr Odinga said Harris Media and Cambridge Analytical were no different.
“The
net result of the work by Cambridge Analytica and Harris Media, which
worked for the same client, is that this was a very negative campaign,”
he explained.
In the secret Channel 4
investigative video aired last week, the firm brags that it “rebranded
the (Jubilee) Party twice, wrote their manifesto, done to rounds of
50,000 or so surveys, as well as writing all its speeches.”
Its
effect, Mr Odinga explained: “I think we were one of the first guinea
pigs in this experiment. In 2013, we were new to this kind of thing, and
we did not know how to deal with it. And then they came in 2016, and
this time, they had perfected the art of manipulating data.”
'DANGER'
Cambridge
Analytica has since suspended its chief executive Alexander Nix, whom
they said did not, in the Channel 4 News video, depict the values the
company stands for.
President
Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party has denied working with the firm in both its
2013 and 2017 campaigns, but party vice-chairman David Murathe, without
expounding, has said that the party had paid for “branding” in the 2017
presidential election from SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook,
on the other hand, has apologised to its users, saying that the data
was irregularly given to the firm by a second party, who had wanted to
use it for academic purposes, without its consent.
Mr Odinga warned that if left unchecked, the campaign tactics taken by the British firm will kill democracy.
“The
introduction of this system brought by Cambridge Analytica is a danger
universally… if this development is allowed to succeed, then there is no
point of having elections, because it will not be the will of the
people. The people will be turned to robots,” Mr Odinga said in the TV
interview.
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