This report is part of a broader initiative to analyze online discourse and specifically monitor harmful content e.g., hate speech in Kenya on various topics in order to help mitigate the threat of polarizing content in fueling offline and online violence. Insights gathered from the monitoring efforts are shared with civil society actors to inform their efforts geared towards peacebuilding, upholding human rights, cohesion and inclusivity in digital spaces.

Online discourse on LGBTQ+ rights in Kenya. Kenya’s laws forbidding consensual same-sex relations have been used to justify discrimination and violence against the LGBTQ+ community online and offline. In 2019, Kenya’s high court upheld two colonial-era laws criminalising homosexuality on the grounds that activists who petitioned the court “failed to prove that the provisions are discriminatory.” In the following years, after this ruling, harmful content targeting the LGBTQ+ community has continued to rise, especially online, albeit sporadically. This problem content has been seen to correlate with various events linked to the topic, e.g. documented public cases of discrimination, violence, or hate crime towards a member of the LGBTQ+ community, a policy or bill touching this matter, speech by a political leader, a visit by a foreign government dignitary, etc. For instance, in April 2022, the death of Sheila Lumumba, a 25-year-old Kenyan non-binary lesbian, triggered polarising conversations online, on LGBTQ rights in Kenya, where some social media users were justifying violence against members of the LGBTQ community. This pattern was also repeated in January 2023 after fashion model and LGBTQ activist Edwin Chiloba2 was found dead in Kapsaret. It was also seen in February 2023, after the Supreme Court of Kenya ruled that gays and lesbians have the right to association, a spike of hateful content was witnessed on social media condemning the ruling and calling for the harming of the LGBTQ community.

We began monitoring the online discourse on the topic, specifically on Facebook, to try to understand the sub-themes surrounding the harmful narratives on social media with the aim of addressing online harm and hate speech. This report therefore provides a topline analysis of some of the events that have taken place from January to May 2023 and the resulting narratives that emerge in relation to these events.