A Kenyan senator is giving away cash to all Kenyan citizens to help them through the COVID-19 outbreak.
A Kenyan senator is giving away cash to help people through the “difficult situations” of the Covid-19 outbreak, claim posts on a Facebook page using the name “Senator Gideon Moi”., Gideon Moi represents Baringo county in Kenya’s senate., “Am giving out KSh20,000 to all Kenyan citizens to at least save them in these difficult situations,” one post reads. “Kindly send me your Mpesa number through inbox in order to serve you easily and keep a way con men’s who may take your number to con you.”, M-Pesa is a mobile money transfer system widely used in Kenya., Another post reads: “I will share with you Kenyans the small I have at this season and KSh10,000 is what I will give you as my great Kenyans. Kindly send me your Mpesa or Airtel number through inbox …”, Is the senator really giving away money?, Africa Check asked Alex Kiprotich, the senator’s communication aide, if the Facebook page and posts were legitimate., “Those are lies. That’s a fake account that someone has created,” he told us., A look through the page transparency details of the fake page shows that it has just over 700 followers, and was set up on 2 April 2020. – Dancan Bwire, , "A fact-checker has rated your Facebook or Instagram post as “false”. What should you do? First, dont delete!", Click on our guide for the steps you should follow., Publishers guide, Africa Check is a partner in Facebook’s third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media., The content we rate as “false” will be downgraded on Facebook and Instagram. This means fewer people will see it., You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how., Africa Check is working with the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 fact-checkers fighting misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic., Learn more about the alliance here., , © Copyright Africa Check 2020. Read our republishing guidelines.\xa0You may reproduce this piece or content from it for the purpose of reporting and/or discussing news and current events. This is subject to: Crediting Africa Check in the byline, keeping all hyperlinks to the sources used and adding this sentence at the end of your publication: “This report was written by Africa Check, a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website", with a link back to this page., We depend on voluntary donations to run this site. Please help us to keep public figures accountable by supporting the project., Find out more, For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially. Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results., , Get a weekly dose of facts, straight to your inbox.
Beware imposter accounts! Senator not giving Covid-19 cash to ‘all Kenyans’ | Africa Check