Beyond connectivity: The hidden dangers behind Kenya’s rapid digital expansion

By James Kiilu

Digital technologies have opened new doors for connection, learning, and participation. However, they have also forced a question that we can no longer ignore: What happens when digital expansion outpaces the frameworks meant to guide it?

Today, digital expansion is moving faster than our ethics, laws, and social systems can keep up, and the burdens of this imbalance is falling along the familiar lines of gender, class, and social exclusion.

In his 2024 report, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, warned of three interconnected threats in the digital age: The rise of the misogynistic manosphere; the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and its gendered harms; and the intensification of technology-facilitated violence. These are moral challenges pressing us to ask what obligations we owe one another in the digital spaces we inhabit.

These global threats are not distant from our own domestic realities. In Kenya, similar patterns are emerging as more people use digital platforms to access and share health information.

The Digital Health and Rights Project conducted research with young adults to document experiences of technology-facilitated abuse (TFA), and more than 75 percent of participants raised the issue. The gendered nature of this harm was unmistakable. Women and sexual minorities faced the greatest exposure, often targeted precisely because of who they are, not what they did online.

Research participants from the Digital Health and Rights Project research study described digital spaces as largely unregulated, with little respect for dignity or privacy. Many said that cyberbullying has become almost normal. They also pointed to the rise of deepfakes, impersonation, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.

Just weeks ago, the internet was flooded with such material, and the muted public response showed how easily harm could become part of everyday life. Even peer educators and young people sharing sexuality education face hostility and attempts to silence them. These online harms have real consequences: Depression, anxiety, suicide, and sometimes even evolving into physical violence.

Increasingly, young people are withdrawing from digital spaces or adopting dual identities to protect themselves, or limiting their participation or disappearing altogether. When people retreat or hide, we don’t just lose their presence; we lose their voices in public health, civic debate, and the shaping of our future.

We often treat these harms as peculiar to the online world, as if the technology were somehow responsible for producing them. But what appears online does not originate online. It is the digital expression of older forms of prejudice: Misogyny modernised, stigma digitised, and long-standing inequalities finding new instruments of expression.

Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) is not a failure of individuals behaving badly behind screens. It is a failure of systems that tolerate, and sometimes normalise, such conduct.

Kenya’s healthcare system has long been marked by inequalities based on geography, gender, sexuality, and class. Digital health has often been presented as a neutral public good: Expanding access, reducing costs, and modernising services. Yet for women, people with HIV, and other marginalised groups, it has created new avenues for abuse, especially for those already facing structural barriers.TFA has become a tool of social control, to punish visibility, confidence and dissent. It silences women who speak, communities who express themselves and anyone who challenges established norms.

Addressing TFA requires confronting the structural inequalities that sustain it. Which brings us to the larger question: What kind of digital future do we want to build?  If we are to rely solely on the virtues of individuals, on good manners, decency and respect, we will be disappointed. These virtues matter, but they cannot substitute for the public frameworks that uphold dignity. Rights-based digital governance is essential because it sets a minimum standard of how we treat each other online.

As a country, we need far better enforcement of the legal safeguards we already have, including the appropriate use of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act to genuinely serve the public good.

Kenya must strengthen civil litigation pathways so that victims can hold platforms and perpetrators accountable. Civil remedies offer forms of justice that criminal punishment alone cannot provide.

Additionally, because it is clear that TFA is a gendered practice, our policies and strategies must stop treating it as gender neutral. A gendered problem cannot be solved by gender-blind frameworks. If we are to protect those most affected, then gender must be central in how we design, enforce and evaluate our digital governance.

The rallying call during this year’s 16 Days of Activism (November 25- December 10) focused on ending digital violence against women and girls. In the same spirit, we must increasingly recognise that TFA is not a distant or separate issue from the global struggle against gender-based violence; it is its newest frontier and a central challenge in the fight for dignity, equality, and justice.

If we fail to confront TFA with urgency and clarity, we risk building a digital future that protects and conveniences only those already safe, while exposing those most vulnerable to even greater harm.

The very communities digital health and innovation claim to empower will continue to pay the cost of connection. Undeniably, in our silence and decisions to do nothing, we will have already chosen the kind of society we are willing to become – a society where harm evolves faster than our will to stop it.

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James Kiilu is a Medical Doctor and Member of the Kenya Community Advisory Team, Digital Health and Rights Project