African Elections as a Testing Ground: Comparing Coverage of Cambridge Analytica in Nigerian and Kenyan Newspapers

ABSTRACT

In March 2018, British and American news outlets published extensive reporting on Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) ethically and legally questionable activities in political campaigns around the world. This reporting primarily focused on three issues: data privacy and protection, unethical political campaigning on social media, and foreign involvement in national elections. While much attention has been paid to CA’s work in the US and UK, these exposés also provided details about CA’s work in presidential elections in Nigeria and Kenya. Because little attention has been paid to CA’s work in Africa, we conducted a qualitative textual analysis of four Nigerian and Kenyan newspapers to understand how media in these countries grappled with CA’s role in their respective presidential elections. Our findings demonstrate, first, that newspaper coverage in both countries relied heavily on international reporting, and second, while Nigerian newspapers covered the scandal as an intranational conflict between competing political parties, the Kenyan press wrestled with the scandal’s implications for the country’s democratic institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambridge Analytica
• Facebook
• data privacy
• elections
• Nigeria
• Kenya

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Reporting on CA appeared in the sister publications The Observer and The Guardian. For sake of simplicity, we refer to this reporting as The Guardian.

2 Ch4, s37: “The privacy of citizens, their homes, correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraphic communications is hereby guaranteed and protected.”

3 Ch4, s34: “Every individual is entitled to respect for the dignity of his person.”

4 Article 31.

5 We relied on Google site searches rather than Nexis Uni, ProQuest, or NewsBank because these databases did not adequately index the publications included in our study.