In Kenya, hate media has found a new home

The message Mashada posted on their forum page

One of Kenya's most popular discussion forums had to close its doors yesterday (31 January) because of a barrage of abusive and hate-inciting comments left by web-users. James X runs the ‘Mashada' project. He explains that the site's once relatively peaceful discourse had taken a decisively violent turn since the elections. It seems that the internet is being used to fuel ethnic loathing. Could this media become the next Radio Mille Collines?

Everyone remembers the calls for murder broadcast by Radio Mille Collines during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. You can't compare the 800,000 massacres in Rwanda with the current one thousand in Kenya. However, James tells us that a renewal of ethnic tensions is more than visible on the web, and that it started even before the elections. And threatening behaviour on the internet will only mean one thing on the ground.

“The last thing I want is that my forum becomes hate-fuelled”

James O is in charge of Mashada and originally from Kenya.

We’ve decided to close the forum because we haven’t managed to control the heinous messages coming in. We receive around 5000 comments a day and we’ve only got three people to supervise the discussions. We’ve seen a definite change in the last few months. Since November, when the electoral period started, more and more people started to post ethnically insulting comments. Before that, ethnicity had never been a problem on the forum. We started to ban some of the most aggressive people. There were two camps: those for the incumbent president and those against. But finally, we were just bombarded. I think there was some organising it. They clearly wanted to enrage the debates because political leaders profit from these ethnic tensions, but we can’t prove that the site was manipulated. We would love to reopen the forum, but need a bigger team to moderate the messages. The last thing we want is for our forum becomes hate-fuelled"