Raila Junior reveals unknown details about his father days after he met Uhuru
Raila Junior has also spoken about how his father got massive Facebook likes.
Making reference to the infamous Facebook page which gained popularity in the 2017 campaigns, Raila Junior said that the efforts to have Facebook pull down the page which had over 200,000 likes with gravely damaging content in the first week, were futile.
“We noticed that Real Raila Facebook page overnight grew to 100K likes, and in a week 200k likes meaning someone was heavily sponsoring the page.
“We started to figure out something was going on when we saw that Real Raila Website would pop up as number one google search when you typed anything to do with Raila, elections, 2017,” the Opposition Chief’s son said on Twitter.
ADVERTISEMENT
He added: “We then approached FB with efforts to pull down the page which had malicious untrue content but these fell on deaf ears, as we only got generic responses.”
International firm
He further explained that the blatant attempts by Facebook to refuse to pull down the page was suspicious, as it laid bare their guesses that the page was being run by an international company. He also added that the smear campaign against his father was all over search engines, especially Google.
ALSO READ: I'm ready to quit - Aden Duale
“We could tell the production of real Raila FB page was not local, as it lacked local nuances meaning it wasn’t being done by a local production house,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
He added: “The recent revelation by Channel 4 News on the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the Kenyan Elections has vindicated those of us who raised the alarm and were ignored.”
The revelations by Raila Junior comes barely a week after a steamy expose in which President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party is implicated in having worked with a data giant Cambridge Analytica to run smear campaigns against Opposition leader Raila Odinga.
British based Channel 4 News early this week in a damning expose showed one of the company’s top bosses, Alexandar Nix, bragging on how they run the 2013 and 2017 campaigns, how they rebranded both TNA and Jubilee parties, wrote speeches and manifestos, conducted two researches on behalf of the parties, “stage the whole thing” and “ran every element of his [Kenyatta’s] campaign”.
Meanwhile, Raila Odinga-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) has already called for a ban on involvement of foreign companies in the country’s elections.
ADVERTISEMENT
The party spoke as revelations over the role British data mining firm Cambridge Analytica played in the 2017 presidential elections continued to unfold, with whistleblower Christopher Wylie saying he got his job as the firm’s top data analyst following the death of his predecessor Dan Muresan in Kenya in 2012.
It was after the death of Mr Muresan, son of former Romanian Agriculture Minister Ioan Avram Muresan, who worked in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s 2013 campaign, that Mr Wylie was hired.
Mr Wylie has since lifted the lid on potentially illegal activities the data firm used to influence voters by leveraging on their fears and concerns.
JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!
ADVERTISEMENT
Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:
Email: news@pulselive.co.ke