{"id":935,"date":"2009-02-13T23:16:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T21:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.africanews.it\/english\/?p=935"},"modified":"2009-02-13T23:16:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T21:16:00","slug":"kenya-mobile-phone-text-messages-help-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/kenya-mobile-phone-text-messages-help-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenya: mobile phone text messages help democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Mobile phones <strong>text messages<\/strong> in Kenya are quite a good tool for the country&#8217;s <strong>democracy<\/strong>, one of the strongest in Africa.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The Kenyan newspaper <strong>Daily Nation<\/strong> reports on its website, recalling &#8220;a global press freedom group&#8221;.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">As reported on the Daily Nation website, &#8220;the New York-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cpj.org\/\">Committee to Protect Journalists<\/a> (<strong>CPJ<\/strong>) highlights the Kenyan media&#8217;s reliance on text messages from the field in covering the 2007 presidential election&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p><!--more-->The committee said that <strong>Kenyans<\/strong> were able to receive updates about the vote count through text messages. Informations otherwise unavailable, as stated by the CPJ.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&#8220;According to the report, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SMS\"><strong>SMS<\/strong><\/a> feature on mobile phones was also used to \u201cspread vitriol and threats across the landscape\u201d amidst disputes over the vote count&#8221;. Others sent messages urging people to stay calm, trying to answer messages of hate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">According to Julianna Rotich and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joshuagoldstein.com\">Joshua Goldstein<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard<\/a> University, as mentioned in the CPJ report, &#8220;mobile phones and the Internet were a catalyst to both predatory behaviour such as ethnic-based mob violence and to behaviour such as citizen journalism and human rights campaigns.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nation.co.ke\/News\/-\/1056\/528218\/-\/u1xxtu\/-\/index.html\">nation.co.ke<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=640\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mobile phones text messages in Kenya are quite a good tool for the country&#8217;s democracy, one of the strongest in Africa. The Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation reports on its website, recalling &#8220;a global press freedom group&#8221;. As reported on the Daily Nation website, &#8220;the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) highlights the Kenyan media&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.africanews.it\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}