The battle for Kenya’s next president is not being fought only at rallies, in televised debates, or in newspaper headlines. It has slipped into the quiet corners of daily life. It lives on the phone screens of day laborers, market traders, university students, and shepherds in rural villages. A woman in western Kenya scrolls through a forwarded video and sees a political leader supposedly giving money to a crowd. A farmer in the Rift Valley listens to a WhatsApp audio claiming that election officials are planning to rig ballots. A young voter in Mombasa sees a photo of a candidate…

1 Volcanoes have a strange and powerful hold on us. Whether they are quiet, snow-capped peaks or rumbling, ash-choked behemoths mid-eruption, they stir something deep in the human imagination. They are terrifying and beautiful at the same time, reminders that the ground beneath our feet is alive and capable of changing in an instant. As volcanologists, we have devoted our lives to studying these forces of nature, but we have also noticed something troubling in the age of rolling news and social media. Passion for volcanoes too often gets tangled up with false claims, recycled images, and myths that have…