By Victor Ochieng

There is a phrase you will see often on Kenyan social media: Wewe Rudi Facebook literally go back to Facebook. But the person isn’t really talking about Facebook the app. What they are actually saying is something closer to “Chief, what you have brought here belongs to a different social class of internet users.”

It sounds like a joke. Most of the time, it is delivered like one.

Someone posts something on X or even the famous clock app, TikTok that feels a little too Facebook-ish and within minutes, somebody appears in the comments “Wewe Rudi Facebook.”

Go back where you came from. And I keep wondering, when did social media platforms become markers of status? Anyways before we get there let me take you back to where all this started for me.

First Facebook Account

My first Facebook account was opened abroad, by the way. I joined Facebook in 2010 while I was a student at Our Lady of Fatima Secondary School. We had gone to Sweden for an exchange program between my secondary school and MediaGymnasiet in Sweden. The program focused on media training and journalism. So yes, I think I can brag a little and say I opened my first Facebook account while abroad! Segue, should I even call that geographical classism? Anyway, let’s proceed.

This was also during the era when the rumors across the streets were “don’t open these social media accounts using your real name. You don’t want to put your personal information out there for the world to see.” Fair enough. So, there you go: V-Key Cruz! Facebook account opened.

Where did that name come from? V-Key from those who know me, a short form of Victor and Cruz came from Jamaican reggae artist Anthony Cruz, who gave us the song Dem Block the Road, sampled from the famous I Feel Good Riddim. Listen, I was a big reggae and dancehall fan at this time.

Remember, around this time I was already running a radio program at Koch FM, a community radio station in Nairobi. I was hosting a teen program called Teen Baze while also shadowing a reggae show called Desta Moments. You guys, I was the real deal. My radio name was Yut Man V-Key!

Anyways, I opened the Facebook account and then barely used it. A week later I had already forgotten my login details. Eventually, after my colleagues at MediaGymnasiet convinced me that the internet would not collapse literally if I used my actual name, I opened another account and that is still my current Facebook account today. This time Victor Ochieng. Those were the days when Facebook had the famous poke feature. You would poke somebody—especially someone of the opposite gender and somehow, it felt like you had accomplished something.

Basically:

Heeey, I see you! If you know you know.

Then Twitter entered the chat

After secondary school, Facebook became very important to me. That’s where I posted my thoughts, my progress and my career —and boy did I post them consistently and in detail. Then came Twitter. Twitter was a different ball game altogether.

You only had 140 characters and to me the platform felt almost authoritative. Senior people were there. Journalists were there. Politicians were there. People you considered respectable members of the society were there posting very serious things.

I even remember the late Chief Francis Kariuki, a renowned Kenyan administrator who became known as “Africa’s tweeting Chief.” Kariuki used twitter to foster cohesion in his community, share information and mobilize people. Man, twitter was the platform for progress and forwardness!

Then Twitter introduced the blue verification badge. For those who only know today’s world where you can pay for a blue check, there was a time when you actually had to apply for verification. Twitter would determine whether you were notable and whether the account was authentic. That made the platform feel even more like a members-only club. I didn’t particularly like that.

I joined Twitter somewhere around 2015 or 2016 when I was running a radio program at USIU Radio. Mostly, I used it to tell listeners what was happening or report what some significant person had said. That was it. Updates. No posting my whole life. No threads. No fighting strangers at 2 a.m.

At some point I deactivated my account and came back about a month later, only to find out it no longer existed. Why? Apparently, under X, if your account remains deactivated for more than 30 days, it gets permanently deleted.

So, my current X account has, what, 10 followers? I think these days I mainly use it to see updates and to find out who is fighting who.

All these time, Facebook was still home.

Instagram? Lord have mercy!

Instagram, on the other hand, was there for showing off. At least that’s how I saw it. And at that point in my life, I really didn’t have much to show off apart from pictures of myself holding a camera.

These were the days when the word “socialite” became popular in Kenya. Instagram seemed like their natural habitat; people whose fame and lifestyle were built largely through social media. Around my circle there was almost a stigma attached to the platform, if you posted there too much? Socialite.

Not me. I avoided that app like the plague. Of course, eventually I joined like everybody else.

And then came the clock app

TikTok is actually my most recent subscription to this social-media madness. I still have fewer than 200 followers, but it’s all good.

I love TikTok. That’s where I meet this whole group of people who are just… interesting.

But before we proceed, can I say something?

I miss the days when production equipment was expensive. Because now everybody has a phone and a small mic, others are even placed on beards and before you know it, they are all specialists.

Political analysts. Immigration attorneys. Relationship experts and coaches. Spiritual guides. Financial advisors. Literally everything.

And oh boy, do I dislike and swipe like I don’t care these TikTokers who start their videos with the same phrases:

“Tell me why?”

“Why is nobody talking about this?”

Come on @user384784 (not a real username), we get it. You fear we are going to scroll away and miss your very important message. But why not just deliver the message?

But one of the most interesting places on TikTok is actually the comment section. Someone will make what they believe is a perfectly reasonable observation and then somebody replies “Wewe rudi Facebook.” In other words: Omera you do not belong here. And that’s when the phrase becomes more interesting than the joke.

When apps became social classes

At some point, social media stopped being just different platforms where people communicated. We started giving each platform its own identity, culture and strangely enough, social class.

Facebook became one thing. X (formerly twitter) became another. TikTok on the other hand, developed its own language, dance challenges, sounds and inside jokes that mostly got us millennials on the receiving end, trying to keep up with the Gen-Zs.

The famous “bag ni ya nini” and “onyi tulia” lingos got me to levels where I genuinely had to figure out what these people were talking about.

Me and the other 500 millennials reading this, may you all feel tagged and mentioned!

Facebook, once the center of social-media life for many Kenyans, somehow became the place people make fun of. It’s the platform of long posts, family pictures—with our boomers coming through with their classic “I love my family in Jesus’ name” quotes and people commenting “following” under everything. And how can I forget: Victor Ochieng and 100 others have been tagged in a photo. I hated that thing.

Then there was Twitter. Sorry X. I am a laggard. It’s taking me a while to adjust to this new name. X, at least in Kenya, has built a culture around speed, wit, politics and being on the joke before everybody else. In fact, Kenyans on the platform even have their own name: KOT-Kenyans on Twitter. I am assuming we are now supposed to call them KOX-Kenyans on X?

Whatever the name, this unit is not to be played with. Get on their wrong side and they will harass you in shifts.

There is an unspoken expectation that you understand the language on the platform. You need to know the memes. You need to understand the references and sometimes you even need to know what happened three hours ago just to understand what everybody is laughing about now.

And if you don’t? You already know what is coming: “Wewe rudi Facebook.”

Don’t mind me. I warned you I would use this phrase several times.

TikTok has created another world altogether. Its culture moves through short videos, sounds, trends and creators who can become famous overnight.

Some of the more recent Kenyan examples are the famous artist-cum-amateur boxer Mbavu Destroyer, with his now famous  “Weka Mawe” and Luo artist Atommy Sifa, whose “mano adapted” has taken on a life of its own. And somehow, it has worked for them. Kenyans have rallied behind these personalities, amplified their slogans and in some cases, helped turn that attention into marketing deals and opportunities.

Basically, on TikTok you don’t always need a five-year strategic plan. Sometimes you just need two words, a phone camera and Kenyans deciding that today is your day.

Instagram has its own identity too. It is visual. Curated. Travel. Fashion and photography. And carefully selected pieces of our lives that suggest everything is going wonderfully.

None of this is necessarily bad. Different platforms naturally develop different cultures.

But wait. I forgot LinkedIn.

LinkedIn deserves its own paragraph

LinkedIn is nothing but a pure platform for depression and stress overhaul. You open LinkedIn on an innocent Tuesday morning and immediately discover somebody you went to school with has become the vice president of something important.

Someone else: “I am humbled to announce…”

Another person has just finished their third master’s degree

Somebody has joined the UN

Somebody has been nominated for an Emmy

And somehow, all these announcements eventually arrive at the famous: “It is moments like these that remind me…”

Remind you of what, Onyi? You just got the job. Celebrate and let us suffer in peace.

My God! I have mentally suffered on LinkedIn. Anyway. We move on regardless.

“Huyu ni wa kukam”

What interests me is what happens when all these different platform cultures become hierarchies. We begin treating one platform as more intelligent than another. One audience becomes sophisticated while the other becomes old-fashioned. One group supposedly understands the internet while the other doesn’t,

In Kenya, there is another phrase that operates in almost the same way: “huyu ni wa kukam”

For my non-Kenyan friends, let me explain this one. Kukam comes from “to come.”

It is part of a geographical classism around Nairobi. If you were born and raised in the city, you are sometimes imagined to be more familiar with the city life, trends and culture. Someone who moved to Nairobi later can jokingly be dismissed as wa kukam— someone who “came.”

In other words, you either came to Nairobi by bus or by birth.

Well, luckily for me, I came by birth. But notice how similar the logic is; Huyu ni wa kukam and wewe rudi Facebook. Both are jokes but both also draw an invisible line between us and them.

And suddenly, something as simple as which app you use becomes a small marker of status.

Except…we are all the same people

This is the funniest part. The person laughing at Facebook users on X probably still has a Facebook account. The person making TikToks reposts them on Instagram. Screenshots from X end up on Facebook. Facebook posts migrate to X. TikTok videos travel everywhere. And I have accounts on almost all of them. Well, apart from Snapchat.

I still don’t even understand how that thing work

The walls we have created between these platforms are mostly imaginary. But the attitudes behind them are real. People attach ideas about intelligence, age, education, money, politics, urban culture and even sophistication to the platform someone uses. And in the joke is something very human.

We like creating groups

We like knowing who is inside and who is outside. We create rules, languages and status systems; even in digital spaces that did not exist twenty years ago. Social media was supposed to connect everybody. Instead, sometimes we simply recreate the same boundaries we already have offline. Just with usernames, followers and algorithms. And here is what I find even more interesting; the hierarchy isn’t fixed. Someone can have enormous status on X because they understand politics, current affairs and the language of the platform and open TikTok and be completely lost.

Someone dismissed as a “Facebook uncle” might have far more knowledge, expertise and wisdom than the 24-year-old mocking them in the comments.

A person with 200 followers on X might have 500,000 on TikTok.

So, who exactly is the sophisticated one?

Maybe every online community simply invents its own definition of what it means to be informed, relevant or culturally current.

And then we start believing those definitions are real. Maybe social media did not remove our class boundaries. Maybe we simply recreated them online, gave each one an app icon and learned new ways of telling people where they belong.

So, the next time somebody tells you “Wewe rudi Facebook,” maybe ask yourself what they are really saying. Because sometimes it has very little to do with Facebook. And, as my famous clock-app guys would say: “Onyi tulia” It’s never that serious.