Kenyans will soon be required to present their national IDs or any other form of identification before accessing social media sites as part of the measures the government is taking to protect children from harmful content online.
The new industry guidelines, by the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA), published in April, provide a framework for the design, development, and use of ICT products and services in a way that guarantees the safety of children online.
The Industry Guidelines For Child Online Protection and Safety In Kenya, state that children, too, have the right to access information as well as the right to the freedom of expression, hence the need to protect them while they are on the internet.
According to CA, the responsibility of safeguarding children online falls on everyone, therefore, Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Content Service Providers (CSPs) have been urged to develop age-verification mechanisms to ensure children do not access media they are not supposed to.
"Develop, use and implement age-verification mechanisms in the deployment of ICT products and services, to facilitate children’s right to freedom of expression and access to information," one of the guidelines read in part.
To achieve this, mobile service operators have been directed to take two crucial steps to ensure users of specific SIM cards are fully registered.
Firstly, all SIM cards used by children should be registered in line with the provisions in the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998 and the Kenya Information and Communications (Registration of SIM-cards) Regulations, 2015.
The other one is that all mobile phone subscribers appropriately register their SIM cards and declare the intended subscribers of the SIM cards.
These new guidelines could see internet service providers employ ways of having Kenyans verify their ages before accessing the internet to align with the authority's new regulations.
The measures are expected to curb cyberbullying, hate speech, and misinformation, which are often emboldened by the anonymous nature of social media and other online profiles.
Linking such profiles to real identities would make it easier to apprehend online fraudsters, trolls and other social media criminals to stop them in their tracks.
Although it would be a turning point for online safety in Kenya, efforts to implement similar mechanisms in other countries have significantly failed. Nigeria and India, also big users of the internet, have failed in implementing similar regulations.
On the downside, concerns about the ID date being leaked in digital hacks have been raised. The mandatory identification could also leave government critics, bloggers, and ordinary Kenyans who rely on anonymity to speak freely vulnerable.
