Kenya’s State House on Sunday quickly pulled down a social media post congratulating Uganda President Yoweri Museveni on his re-election.
A tweet from State House, acknowledging Museveni’s win, was pulled down a shortly after being posted.
“President Uhuru Kenyatta has termed President Yoweri Museveni’s re-election as a testimony of the confidence the people of Uganda have in his leadership,” read the tweet by Statehouse.
The post on Facebook and twitter was deleted after the social media giant flagged it as containing misinformation. The deletions, intended to save face, were however interpreted by Kenyans on social media as Kenya retracting its congratulations to the Ugandan president in the midst of questions on the integrity of the Thursday elections.
However, Kenyan fact-checker PesaCheck, which works with Facebook to fact-check content published on the social media site, said the message had been erroneously flagged as false on account of the picture used alongside it. PesaCheck said the post by State House did not have any false information that had been looked into by fact-checkers, but merely used a photo that was part of a 2019 Facebook post which was marked as false. Facebook works with third-party fact-checkers such as PesaCheck, to rid the platform of misinformation.
Museveni’s victory comes amid a dark cloud of accusations about electoral irregularities from the lead challenger of the presidential race, Bobi Wine.
His challenger blamed the regime of ballot stuffing, beating up of his party’s polling agents coupled with the internet shutdown which impeded efforts of electoral monitoring and transparency.
Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Bobi Wine rejected the results saying the election was rigged.
Additional info- The Standard
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