Proposal to regulate social media absurd

In a rare light-bulb moment, Malava MP Moses Malulu Injendi has now come up with a bill to police Facebook and WhatsApp groups. The Kenya Information and Communication (Amendment) Bill, 2019 may look like a reasonable legislative move for the second-term lawmaker, but it is technically deficient, ill-informed and contains unenforceable clauses.

It appears to impose national borders on social media and the Internet. It ignores the obvious that for someone to write about anything happening in Kenya, they don’t need to be in Kenya. The Internet itself is borderless. Unlike China, which we could argue has its own version of the Internet, Kenyans on the Internet and social media depend on platforms made in the West; Google, Facebook, Twitter. These platforms have community standards and reporting mechanisms to do exactly what the MP proposes in the bill and so far, it is difficult to understand why he thinks another piece of law would work better.