Government Denies Plans To Block Twitter & Facebook in Kenya

With the recent incidents of tribal hatred felt on online especially on Twitter and Facebook, there were rumours that the Government will block the social sites in Kenya. However, the Government has denied these claims.

According to the PS in the Ministry of Information and Communication, Bitange Ndemo, the government does not intend to switch off social media despite the increasing hate speech and incitement being experienced on the sites.He added that the biggest challenge they are facing with tracking those behind it is that certain users do not use their real names as expected when opening an account.

If the Government had gone ahead with the plans to block the social networking sites, we would be like China in 2009 where the government blocked Facebook and Twitter on the view that the people who were behind the riots of Tibet and Xinjiang where using the two sites to plan their destruction.

In January, the government had released a list of Facebook pages and blogs that were being monitored closely for suspicion of spreading hate messages.