Insensitive joke about former VP Moody Awori

On Monday evening a bad rumour  about the “death” of Kenya’s ninth Vice-President was circulating the social media .The false news was about former Funyula MP Moody Awori, who is still alive and well

An insensitive gossip blogger, writing on www.africagossipnews.com, ventured in, declaring Uncle Moody’s end.

To prove his point, the blogger faked tweets from three credible Twitter pages of two known personalities and that of the Nation Media Group (NMG).As Kenyans started to ask what had happened to Mr Awori, the blogger embedded “tweets” from NMG’s news alerts handle, @NationBreaking, supposedly breaking the news.

It was a minute after 8pm.

Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga “tweeted” his condolences as “did” National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale.

The Nation’sonline team on duty at the time was not even aware of the blog post, so we chose to put the rumours to bed by contacting the family associates, who confirmed Uncle Moody was alive.

On Wednesday, we paid the veteran politician a visit at his home in Nairobi, where he was relaxing with his children and other family members, including Cabinet Secretary Judi Wakhungu and Dennis Awori, the chairman of Toyota Kenya.

During the visit, Mr Awori and his family vehemently rebutted claims that he was ill and said that at no point was he admitted to hospital.

“As you can see, I am in perfect health. I do not understand why such information would be spread,” he said

On Wednesday, Mr Odinga denied the tweets linked to him.

Philip Etale, the director of communications of the Orange Democratic Movement, which Mr Odinga leads, announced the rumours had been a bad joke and told the public to ignore the “news’

In Uncle Moody’s case, the blogger simply snapped previous genuine tweets from the handles in question using an app, then edited out the contents and replaced them with the news of the “death”.

It looked genuine, except that it wasn’t