AI tools become students’ ‘weapons’ in political protests

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are providing tertiary-educated youth in Africa with new mechanisms to express their political and social viewpoints without having to demonstrate with placards in the streets – a scenario that shows that voices of dissent on the continent are rapidly shifting to digital platforms.

For instance, AI has been amplifying critical political voices in Kenya since June last year, when the police cracked down on street protests by tertiary-educated youth over the high cost of living.

Parodies of AI-generated silhouette animations that critiqued the government and ridiculed politicians have been circulating on social media forums, mainly TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Facebook. Silhouette animations are short videos that create shadow-like characters, and those cartoon images are controlled frame by frame to convey movement and narrative.

Kasongo videos

Gideon Kibet, alias Kibet Bull, a student at Kenya’s Egerton University, created the most viral images about a character named Kasongo, one of President William Ruto’s monikers, according to his critics. The Kasongo videos depicted Ruto and his allies in unattractive political and governance issues.

Expectedly, those silhouette animations have sparked widespread attention and debate in Kenya and, whereas the critics of Ruto’s government regard them as forms of political expression and free speech, others perceive them as not only disrespectful to leaders, but also a misuse of AI and social media platforms.

Commenting on the issue in December, Raymond Omollo, the principal secretary for internal security, said some people in Kenya were using AI negatively, but the government had no intention of charging the person behind the cartoons under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018.

According to Omollo, those cartoonists should try monetising their creativity instead of ridiculing others.

“The level of creativity of Kenyans is quite amazing and interesting and demonstrates what is possible with AI technology,” said Omollo.

Government’s crackdown

Despite assurance not to locate or arrest the silhouette animators, Kibet and others suspected of sharing some of the Kasongo silhouettes in caskets were abducted before Christmas last year. Eventually, Kibet and four others, including Billy Mwangi, a student at a college in Embu town, and Bernard Kavuli, a communication studies student at Mount Kenya University, were released in early January 2025.

However, a desperate search for over a month for others by their families ended tragically when the bodies of two of them were located in a mortuary in Nairobi on 30 January. That was the day Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja and Mohammed Amin, the director of criminal investigations, appeared in court after snubbing summonses on four occasions to explain the whereabouts of the abducted persons.

Kanja told the court: “I confirm that none of the men is in our custody. But I want to assure all Kenyans that they are safe.” However, the discovery of the two bodies leaves only one person missing among those who were abducted in December.

Although the police have denied responsibility for the kidnappings, most government critics widely believe them to be the work of state intelligence actors. For instance, Human Rights Watch Africa had been linking the abduction to a shadowy state intelligence unit.

The Law Society of Kenya and other human rights defenders told the court that they think the government is responsible and should be held accountable and should release captives in custody, dead or alive.

Violation of human rights

According to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), a state-sponsored agency, over 80 young persons have been abducted in the past six months, of whom 26 are still missing.

Appearing in court on 27 January, KNCHR lawyers condemned the surge of abductions and called on the state to put an end to the heinous trend, which is a gross violation of fundamental rights and freedoms.

Highlighting the demographic and academic profile of the victims of recent abductions in Kenya, Rocha Ndegwa Madzao, the president of the University of Nairobi Student Association, said most of them are tertiary-educated students who are members of Gen Z and Alpha generations.

Pressing for the release of the abducted youth recently, Madzao said educated youth in the country were being victimisation by the government because of their quest for human rights and social justice. “What has happened to freedom of expression in our Constitution?” Madzao queried in frustration.

What lies ahead?

However, the crux of the matter is what lies ahead in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa and beyond, at the intersecting of forces of higher education and, more so, the youth’s exposure to and appetite for using AI technology to express dynamic and divergent views about political and academic freedom, free speech, equality, governance, climate change, and other debatable issues of democracy.

Another question is how AI tech-savvy emerging generations will likely tackle such complicated issues and whether their political voices matter. To date, Gen Z and Alpha are the most connected online, generally more educated than their parents, and are the most sophisticated generations in history in their field of AI.

Giving the youth a voice

Partly, answers to those questions could be possibly found within the theoretical framework of ideas expressed by two scholars: Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, an associate professor of communication and journalism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Ioana Literat, an associate professor of communication, media and learning technologies design at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

In their book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding young people’s political expression on social media, released on 15 October 2024, the two academics pointed out that AI through social media has become a tool for young people to experiment with ideas and express their political voice.

According to the two academics, youth worldwide have been pulling away from the longstanding criteria of evaluating good citizens on a pedestal based on what is perceived as rational and objective. In this case, political expression is expected to be a serious affair, focused on the underlying facts.

However, in sharp contrast, other studies noted that, for the young generations, and more so the educated youth exposed to AI, political expression is humoristic or cynical, colourful and frequently infused with popular culture references. “To those demographic and social groups, political expression is deeply emotional and often profoundly personal,” stated Kligler-Vilenchik and Literat.

Grounded in empirical research of several case studies, Not Your Parents’ Politics has set the stage for a discussion on taking youthful political expression on social media seriously and what the stakes are for political socialisation and democratic participation.

Nevertheless, discussions on democracy and its elements, such as fundamental human rights, free speech, rule of law, political expression and citizen participation in governance have never been easy since 399 BC, when Athens’ councilmen forced Socrates to take poison for allegedly corrupting the city’s youth.

According to Western political thought expounded by the late Austrian-British philosopher, Karl Popper (1902-94), the enemies of democracy, open society, equality and freedom are always at the gates.

However, the enemies of democracy in Africa appear to be already inside the city, too often masked by harmful traditional practices, tribalism, poverty, corruption, religious extremism and political intolerance.

Subsequently, amid efforts to acquire democratic space, youth have been using AI and social media to develop new genres of political expression that differ from traditional political voices. According to Kligler-Vilenchik, young people in America have used TikTok to create short videos lip-syncing Donald Trump’s speeches, celebrating or mocking him through creative editing and performance.

“During the Black Lives Matter protests, young users also created visually appealing artistic activism guides, combining aesthetic appeal with concrete action steps,” said Kligler-Vilenchik in a recent interview.

She stressed that such developments appear to set the stage globally for a new intersection between degenerative artificial intelligence, social media, youth and politics.

“These new forms of political expression may seem jarring or trivial to outside observers used to traditional political discourse, but our research suggests that they represent valid and meaningful ways for young people to develop their political voice through familiar modes of expression that resonate with their peers,” said Kligler-Vilenchik.

Protest voices expected to get louder

Commenting on the Kenyan experience, Gitile Naituli, a professor of management and leadership at the Multimedia University in Nairobi, noted that the protest voices of young people through AI and social media are likely to get louder in the future as long as there is high unemployment and limited economic opportunities despite increasing levels of education.

“The youth in Kenya are also frustrated by the high corruption and poor governance, and there are indicators that they will continue protesting and expressing their concerns despite harassment, intimidation and arrests by the government,” Naituli told University World News.

Naituli sees youth protests in Kenya as an ongoing revolution in the struggle for democracy, but he pointed out that dissent is at risk of going underground due to kidnappings and digital surveillance.

However, for Naituli, the expansion of higher education and exposure to AI technology in Africa have combined increasingly to give young people new ways of political activism, allowing them to share their fears and hopes, and giving them AI tools to evaluate and question their leaders’ decisions.

“AI technology tools have replaced the old ways of demonstrating public concerns,” said Naituli.

Accordingly, Kligler-Vilenchik and Literat predict that the world should expect amplified AI-generated messages of lip-synching speeches, costumes, skits and silhouettes about social justice and political policies in the future.

This would also include sharing artistic forms that are more or less synonymous with political graffiti and culture jamming to protest inequalities, and songs of political expressions that make sense primarily with educated young people’s social media worlds.

However, looking at the history of global social activism, Wesley Hogan, a research professor at the Franklin Humanities Institute and History at Duke University in the United States, says that, in future, educated youth exposed to AI media will become key instigators of the struggle for democracy and social change. In this case, it appears Kenya and the rest of Africa will not be an exception.