Long time guys. I don’t really have a good excuse for why, because my excuse is laziness.

Anyway, I’m currently working on a personal project that involves uploading video to twitter. I don’t want to go into more details because I might never finish it, and I really don’t want too many people asking what happened.

While I was using it to upload some video, I encountered an error that I couldn’t easily fix:

So the guidelines I wrote about last week went into effect, with out any real public input that I could see. I’m so mad about it. These rules are bad for the internet. Now these rules are being used to threaten administrators of Whatsapp groups, as if they have any control over what people say in those groups, or should be criminally liable for that content. It’s complete bullshit. This will have an adverse effect on freedom of speech, mark my words

I’ve never written to the public editor of the Nation newspaper before but this : “If he is to be believed, Americans on Twitter are smarter than their Kenyan counterparts whose major preoccupation in social media seems to be trading insults, ethnic chauvinism and fake news.” rubbed me the wrong way.

This is an assumption not based on any research and I assume comes from the anecdotal evidence from the editor’s own twitter feed or those of his friends and colleagues. This is wrong.  Twitter, in particular, is definitely a function of who you follow. What you see there is your own choice, mostly.

The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the USA presidential election, he will be sworn in some time in January. This was a shock for me and the 4 Americans whom I know. Since then, there’s been a rush to explain the win, the forgotten white people, racism, sexism and fake news among others. The fake news thing was propelled by this Buzzfeed post. Later on I read this post giving interesting suggestions on how the platforms can help with combating fake news. This is the comment I left on the post.