By Victor Mboya
There are 39 days until Kenya’s 2022 general election. As the election draws near, false information has been spreading on social media, including fake newspaper front pages.
The KEG fact-checking desk came across a newspaper front page apparently from the Standard newspaper. It has a photo of President Kenyatta, with the headline “This man messed up a whole country”. We checked if the page, which has spread widely on social media, was genuine.
A reverse image search revealed a front page with the photo of the former treasury secretary, Henry Rotich, not Uhuru Kenyatta.
A tweet by Dr Roselyn Akombe, a former commissioner with Kenya’s election agency, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, which mentioned the newspaper’s front page, matched the date on the newspaper, of 4 November 2019.
The newspaper also tweeted out the front page, which had the photo of Rotich, and published a story about the former cabinet secretary the same day, with the headline included in the story’s web address. The front page with President Kenyatta’s photo is fake.
