This paper investigates how Facebook users in Kenya lean on pictures to amply meaning in their online posts. This argument on visuals, and their utility on social media is important to the current study as visuals form part of the analysis and it will be important to examine what realities they represent apart from the written texts. The article located itself within the frameworks of Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and used questionnaires to obtain data. Pictorial presentation of information has been a common practice in the 21st century Kenya. A text on the Internet may be multimodal; having written speech and visual texts. These visual texts are used with various motives like entertainment, passing information, advocacy, and advertisement. It becomes extremely important to recognize that visuals and other forms of semiosis (making meaning) are as important as words in the construction of reality. A pictorial will often offer a different version of reality from that of verbal text. This study concluded that the number of photos by females was almost double the ones for males, meaning as far as this study is concerned, this motivation factor of photo uploads is more in females than in males.
The increasing shift of human activities to online spaces in Kenya has resulted in the new behaviours among internet consumers. One such behaviour is the growing online public journalism phenomenon amid legal and regulatory gaps permeating expression of online hate speech rhetoric disguised as ‘politically correct talk’ which often goes unquestioned despite its injurious force and the potential to precipitate physical violence in the long run. To judge content as hateful, Kenya’s judicial processes rely the establishment of speech intention to hurt a legally protected entity. However, hate speech law enforcers lack skill and capacity to accurately determine the pragmatic force of hateful language. This article, which is a part of broad study that examined the discursive construction of online hate rhetoric, examines the injurious potential of online micro-speech acts and performative modality of selected Facebook posts and tweets constituting the day-to-day communicative practices online during the 2017 general election in Kenya. Working within forensic-based Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) framework, we analyse a purposive sample of 160 posts; FB (120) and Twitter (40) collected through online observation of Facebook groups and hashtags trending in Kenya between July and November 2017. The findings show how micro-speech acts and performative modality worked in service of aggressive ideology in the form of overt and covert appeals for collective prejudice against marked ethno-political out-groups. These insights are relevant for policy makers such as NCIC, KHR and CAK as well as the hate speech law enforcers especially National Police Service and prosecutors in understanding how certain commonsensical day to day online communicative practices yield pragmatic potential to propagate ideologically rooted culture of hate and violence in multi-ethnic cultural contexts such as Kenya.
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