The Law Society of Kenya has called for the regulation of TikTok in the country amidst ongoing debate and calls for a ban of the digital platform due to abuse by users in the country.
LSK president Eric Theuri, in a memorandum to the National Assembly’s Public Petitions Committee, argues that a regulation of the platform will help deal with some of the cases of abuse witnessed in recent months.
Theuri also argued that banning Tiktok would mean banning all other social media platforms as the problem with the platform was not only isolated to Tiktok.
“The Society recommends that instead of banning TikTok, it should be regulated. The nature of the internet is boundaryless and that it would be futile to ban the site as VPNs exist,” Theuri told the committee.
The LSK president made the submissions to the committee as part of the ongoing investigations by the Parliamentary committee into the use of the platform in the country and calls by a section of Kenyans to have it regulated or banned over abuse.
The committee is currently receiving submissions from different stakeholders on the petition which states that while TikTok has gained popularity among the youth in Kenya, the content that is being shared on the platform is inappropriate.
This, the petition says, has led to the promotion of violence, explicit sexual content, hate speech, vulgar language and offensive behavior which is a serious threat to the cultural and religious values of Kenya.
And in his submission, Theuri also told the committee that Tiktok has allowed content that is of an unconstitutional nature which is not covered by the Freedom of Speech Act.
The Society warned that care must be taken in defining what amounts to harmful content to prevent restricting the right to freedom of expression.
It was further noted that hate speech on the platform is used in different languages including mother tongues. If reported, the content is supposed to be queued to a content moderator for assessment.
However, in Kenya, or Africa at large, the Tiktok algorithm has not been trained to understand local languages. There aren’t enough content moderators to serve Africa, we only have about 200 moderators to serve almost 2000 languages across the continent.
Theuri also proposed to the committee to recommend to the Communications Authority (CA) additional licensing requirements to be levied against companies that undertake sensitive work such as training of algorithms, machine learning, and content moderation, taking into account the case of Chat GPT workers.
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