Kenya’s ICT Minister Speaks on Face-off With Facebook over Hate Speech

The minister’s comment comes in the wake of the NCIC’s 7-day ultimatum to Facebook to remove hate speech or face suspension.
The minister also accused the NCIC of making haphazard decisions, pointing out that they don’t have the power to shut anybody down.

Kenya’s minister for information, communication and technology, Joe Mucheru, has informed the public that the country has no plans to shut down Facebook over its failure to detect hate speech.

Mucheru accused the National Integration and Cohesion Commission (NCIC) of making haphazard decisions and vowed that the country would not shut Facebook down.

“We do not have a plan to shut down any of these platforms,” Joe Mucheru told Reuters. “Press freedom is one we cherish, whether it is (traditional) media or social media,” he added.

On Friday, the NCIC said it had written to Meta, demanding a response to allegations of weak controls in moderating content on its platform ahead of next month’s elections.

“If Facebook doesn’t comply with requirements we have set out within seven days, we will recommend they suspend their operations. We will not allow Facebook to jeopardise our national security”, NCIC’s Dr David Makori said.

Mucheru argued that the NCIC should have consulted widely because they don’t have the power to shut anybody down. According to the minister, Facebook deleted 37,000 hate speech-related posts in the build-up to the August general elections. In addition, the social media giant has taken “extensive steps” to weed out hate speech and inflammatory content, intensifying those efforts ahead of the election.

Ahead of the upcoming general elections in Kenya, Global Witness and Foxglove group investigated how Facebook is extremely poor at detecting hate speech in English and in Swahili. The group submitted 10 ads in English and 10 in Swahili that contained hate speech calling for beheadings, rape and bloodshed. The ads were approved but did not get published on Facebook.

The group informed Meta about the undetected violations, and the tech company admitted to have missed some hate speech messages because of mistakes by the people and machines the platform relies on.

Meta also said they have Swahili speakers and technology to help remove harmful content and have invested in people and technology to help ensure safe and secure elections in Kenya.