Actors driving subtle disinformation assaults on African media ecosystems are profiting from the speedy growth within the attain and accessibility of digital communications to reshape the continent’s info techniques at scales and speeds not attainable by conventional analog platforms.
This onslaught of purposeful obfuscation comes as 300 million Africans have come onto social media prior to now 7 years. There are actually greater than 400 million lively social media customers and 600 million web customers on the continent. Africans who’re on-line depend on social media platforms for consuming information at among the many highest charges on this planet. Social media customers in Nigeria and Kenya are close to the highest of the globe within the variety of hours per day spent on social platforms. They’re concurrently the international locations that report probably the most concern about false and deceptive info.
Russian Disinformation round Niger’s Coup
Constructing on a template employed in Mali and Burkina Faso, Wagner-linked campaigns surrounding the coup in Niger showcase an more and more well-calibrated Russian disinformation playbook in West Africa that’s each calculated and opportunistic. The campaigns focusing on Niger have utilized on-line networks, property groomed on-the-ground like UNPP (Union des Patriotes Panafricanistes) and GPCI (Groupe Panafricain pour le Commerce et l’Investissement), and Russian state media to launch a barrage of pretend content material earlier than, throughout, and after the July 2023 coup in Niger.
Pre-coup: following the October 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, pro-Russian Telegram channels urged Niger as a future goal. Disinformation networks linked to the Wagner Group twice sought to spark rumors of a coup in Niger, together with by what seems to have been a rigorously orchestrated on-line scheme coinciding with a visit overseas by President Bazoum in February 2023.
Quick aftermath: because the coup was unfolding in late July, the chief of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, welcomed the occasions, posting a message of help on Telegram from St. Petersburg the place he was attending the Russia-Africa Summit. Wagner-linked networks echoed Prigozhin in cheering the coup, encouraging the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Niamey, and exploiting the confusion to border the occasions as anti-France and as representing a momentous surge in African help for a Russian imaginative and prescient of the worldwide order. Reality-checkers reported having problem maintaining with the quantity of pretend claims. The impact was to confuse and paralyze residents from responding. As one observer described, “I’ve needed to distance myself from all the things as a result of I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. … Every little thing appears to be a lie or exaggerated.”
Submit-coup: Wagner property sought to consolidate the coup in Niger by derailing negotiations between its leaders and regional mediators. Networks spanning closed channels (Telegram, WhatsApp), social media websites (X/Twitter, Fb), and conventional media (Afrique Média) unfold content material meant to inflame Nigerien distrust of those processes, together with claims that an ECOWAS invasion was imminent and that French fighter jets had been touchdown in Senegal to help ECOWAS. Russian campaigns moved to take advantage of the coup by spreading false narratives selling Wagner mercenaries as a solution to Niger’s safety challenges. Content material associated to Niger spiked by 6,645 % on 45 Russian state and Wagner Telegram channels within the month after the coup, as these accounts ramped up disinformation to cement the army junta and affiliate it with Russia.
