While everyone knows about Cambridge Analytica – the disbanded data analytics company that allegedly used its software to create and disseminate hateful and inciting messages – in relation to Trump and Brexit, the company also played a nefarious role disseminating fake news in Africa.
In Nigeria, it tried to influence the 2015 election by ‘using graphically violent imagery to portray a candidate as a supporter of Sharia law’, according to The Guardian; while in Kenya, the company is said to have played a ‘critical’ role in the 2013 and 2017 elections, with former managing director Mark Turnbull boasting to Channel 4 News that they had ‘written [the] manifesto’ of the ruling Jubilee Party.
