In the final week of May 2020, Kenya’s mainstream media suffered an avalanche of fake newspaper front pages. All the fake headlines targeted politicians. These were saved as images and circulated online on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram.
The design work on these false headlines was near-expert quality. The text and the accompanying pictures crafted in such a way that they were jarringly alarming, and could be quickly consumed on social media, fully taking advantage of the attention economy, and the culture of reading headlines, and depending on the social media grapevine to fill in the gaps.