Thousands of miles from Washington, D.C., Kenya has become a testing ground for disinformation before it reaches America.

John-Allan Namu is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of Uncensored Africa, a media outlet that exposes corruption in his native Kenya and around the world. During a recent visit to Washington, Namu sat down with Scripps News correspondent Liz Landers to discuss the information and disinformation ecosystem in Kenya.

Liz Landers: How do you think disinformation in Kenya compares to disinformation here in the United States?

John-Allan Namu: It’s very similar. What a lot of people tend to forget is that, especially when these kinds of very harmful strategies for creating misinformation are being tested, they’re not being tested here. What you get here is a final product. This has been tested elsewhere. And Kenya is one place where this has already been tested. The Cambridge Analytica scam is a good example of this. All of these strategies were first tested in Kenya before being exported elsewhere. You see this happening again and again, especially in how big tech impacts itself in the world. So you’ll find people in really slave-like conditions training algorithms in Kenya for platforms that operate or are based here. So there is very little difference.

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Liz Landers: What is the impact of disinformation on Kenyans in general? How do you see disinformation spreading on the African continent?

John-Allan Namu: Internet penetration in Kenya is quite high compared to other countries. Much like here in the United States, when a little bit of misinformation is sown on a particular platform, then you start to see it move around and spread across different platforms. The most dangerous ones, obviously, are the ones you can’t track, like WhatsApp and dark social platforms like that. But what you also see is usually on the big platforms like TikTok, Instagram, And before you can fix it, it’s gone very, very far.

Liz Landers: How do you see, as a Kenyan journalist, how disinformation has taken root in the United States?

John Allen: I would say we’re all watching very carefully how that First Amendment is protected, because that’s really the issue. How can we protect a person’s freedom of speech and expression while combating misinformation? The two are contradictory and, in a sense, complementary, because a person must have the freedom to lie to members of the public. What are the lines? This is truly one of the challenges of our time. How do we build or rebuild the kind of trust in various institutions that act as honest intermediaries to be able to continually compete in this marketplace of ideas without touching these fundamental rights? Whether we like it or not, what happens here will have repercussions around the world.