Susanna De Stefani reviews Tony Roberts and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane’s Digital Disinformation in Africa: Hashtag Politics, Power and Propaganda, Bloomsbury Publishing/Zed Books, London, 2024, 256 pages, ISBN 9781350319219.
Digital Disinformation in Africa is a book about how disinformation through digital tools is playing an increasing role on the African continent in distorting elections, inflaming internal conflicts and disrupting crucial policy debates across the continent on issues such as vaccination, gender and reproductive rights. This book is part of the Digital Africa series, which studies the effects of new technologies on the African continent. On one hand, these technologies have certainly facilitated the exercise of democratic rights and freedoms; on the other hand, they have been used by repressive regimes to restrict those rights. A unifying feature of the series Digital Africa, in which this volume is published, is that each book is edited in collaboration with a local expert involved in the African Digital Rights Network, a network of established academics and activists studying the relationship between digital technologies and political-social power in Africa.
Two experts from different knowledge areas brought their contribution to understanding the specifics of digital disinformation in Africa. Tony Roberts is a researcher at the Institute for Development Studies in the UK, who co-founded the African Digital Rights Network after completing his PhD on the use of digital technologies in international development. The other contributor is George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane, a lecturer at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, who dedicates much of his research to the social, political, and economic impacts of digital media in Africa. Some of his most relevant publications on the topic include the monograph The Struggle over State Power in Zimbabwe: Law and Politics Since 1950 and the edited book Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies, Black Histories and the South African Historical Journal.
Digital Disinformation in Africa documents and analyzes the spread of digital disinformation on the African continent, made possible by the contributions of experts from the African Digital Rights Network. The authors emphasize that the focus on digital disinformation should not be interpreted as the predominant aspect of digital communication in Africa. As the whole series Digital Africa tackles the issue of potential technological progress in Africa, this issue will be addressed in future volumes.
Digital disinformation in Africa poses a threat to democracy and fundamental rights. Today, it plays an increasingly important role in distorting elections, fueling internal conflicts, and influencing political debates on crucial issues across the continent. However, concentrating on the “dark side” of digital technology should not lead to underestimating its positive effects.
The authors do not intend to reconstruct the history of disinformation in Africa, as disinformation on the continent is as old as politics itself. Technological innovation often leads to deterministic conclusions about the relationship between social media and disinformation. This book seeks to avoid such scenarios by providing a systemic analysis of the phenomenon in its specific historical and political context. The authors thus seek to highlight the qualitative differences between disinformation in the digital age and earlier forms of disinformation and attempt to clarify what is specifically digital about the phenomenon today.
From the introduction, the authors clearly define their conceptual tools: the definition of disinformation, as opposed to misinformation and fake news. Disinformation, as defined here, consists of the intentional use of falsehoods to manipulate people’s beliefs and behavior to promote political interests. And just as the book asks what is specifically African about “digital disinformation in Africa”, at the same time the book questions what is specifically digital about it. To analyze this qualitative difference, the concept of affordances is employed, referring to the new possibilities for action that a technology enables, invites, or facilitates.
The concept of affordances in this regard is central. This concept seems to play a fundamental role in this type of research, as it helps to recognize the practical differences between disinformation disseminated through traditional media such as radio or television and that practiced through social media. Furthermore, it is clarified how affordances are socially mediated, meaning that the choice to maximize the potential of technology is entirely discretionary, given that governments have varying budgets, technical capacities, and political intentions. Moreover, levels of Internet access and social media usage vary between countries and within populations.
As the authors note, while there is a growing awareness of this phenomenon —especially following the Cambridge Analytica scandal — most researchers have focused their investigations on the “Global North”. On the other hand, disinformation in Africa has always been rooted in its history and is now taking on an increasingly significant, if not alarming, role that cannot be overlooked.
“What is less known is that prior to 2016 Cambridge Analytica also operated in African countries. For example, it was employed in the 2013 Kenyan election, during which it manipulated voters with apocalyptic attack ads and smeared the opposition candidate as violent, corrupt and dangerous.” (p. 3)
The approach is holistic, based on reconstructing the local history, politics, and culture, demonstrating how the colonial history of Africa has contributed to the emergence of distinct models of disinformation. An added value of the book is undoubtedly the diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds of the contributors, who have collected empirical data and conducted analyses of individual cases with their own linguistic, social, and cultural perspectives on the countries they study.
The colonial legacy is certainly a distinguishing feature of disinformation in Africa, as it was introduced by colonial powers as a tool of control and then maintained by post-independence administrations, albeit in new forms afforded by digitalization.
The chapters present the disinformation operations in ten African countries: Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Uganda, Angola, Kenya, and Nigeria. Each chapter begins with a reconstruction of the historical and political context of the country in question to facilitate understanding of the distinctive factors of a particular disinformation episode compared to others. The chapters follow the same structure: the tools used to monitor suspicious accounts and then highlight the most commonly used tactics in spreading false news online. Among the most common are hashtags, primarily used on Twitter and Facebook due to their rapid dissemination, and what the authors define as “keyboard armies,” or consulting firms and influencers paid to carry out online disinformation campaigns.
The role of digital disinformation in maintaining social hierarchies is the first focus. The first chapter, in fact, addresses gendered digital disinformation and women’s civic participation in some states, demonstrating how disinformation fuels inequalities of this kind and often takes on a misogynistic character. This is followed by examples of how disinformation influences contemporary armed conflicts, where such operations are conducted by belligerents to disseminate specific narratives about the conflicts or by governments to neutralize inconvenient narratives. The volume concludes with several chapters dedicated to disinformation campaigns during recent elections held across the continent. Like armed conflicts, elections are true contests for power, and ruling authorities often use state institutions to manipulate voters’ beliefs and behaviors to their advantage.
The examples provided show how African governments coordinate digital disinformation campaigns to divert the opposition from participating in public deliberation and to close online civic space in order to promote their own power interests.
As previously mentioned, the authors emphasize that the book does not aim to reconstruct the history of disinformation in Africa, as disinformation on the continent is as old as politics itself. Given that the novelties of technological innovation often lead to deterministic conclusions about the relationship between social media and disinformation, this book seeks to avoid such scenarios by providing a holistic analysis of the phenomenon within its specific historical and political context. Thus, moving away from the conclusion that disinformation is caused by digital technologies, the authors seek to highlight the qualitative differences between disinformation in the digital age and earlier forms of disinformation. One of the goals is therefore to clarify what is specifically digital about this phenomenon today.
The analysis of disinformation is broken down into four elements (the four “D”s of disinformation): dimensions, dynamics, drivers, and directions. What emerges is actually a tendency towards continuity with disinformation operations prior to the process of digitalization. While the goals of these practices have not changed, the distinctive features of new technologies have enabled the use of new techniques such as micro-targeting or message personalization.
Another key question addressed is whether digital disinformation in Africa is significantly different from digital disinformation in other parts of the world. To understand what is “specifically African” about digital disinformation in Africa, the familiarity of the expert contributors with local history is undoubtedly an essential tool, considering that it is inconceivable to “translate” interpretive categories from the phenomenon that originate in the United States or Europe. The authors’ approach revealed a certain continuity between colonial and postcolonial experiences of disinformation that is not a feature of European or North American disinformation studies.
In addition, this view revealed how disinformation reflects and reproduces ethnic and gender stratifications. The authors are experts from the African Network for Digital Rights, a group of over forty activists, analysts and academics from fifteen African countries. Among them, Nkem Agunwa is an experienced digital communicator and activist, and head of WITNESS’ Africa program, Nkem, which supports activists and legal experts across Africa in defending human rights through video and technology while countering media manipulation. Again, Atnafu Brhane Ayalew is a digital rights activist living in Ethiopia. He has led extensive social media campaigns on the rule of law, constitutionalism, and freedom of expression and, among many others, co-founded the Network for Digital Rights in Ethiopia.
The book offers new points of reflection to be used in studies on disinformation.
As is well known, the phenomenon has reached a significantly advanced level in other parts of the world. Analyzing the phenomenon in a context that often tends to be overlooked fills an important interpretive gap regarding an issue that, on the surface, seems to be confined to what the authors themselves call “the Global North”, such as Europe and North America.
Although other authors have shown that disinformation in other parts of the world and in Africa is related, such as Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracies (reviewed by RevDem, here).
At the same time, however, this detailed examination of local situations, country by country, while valuable because it is developed by experts in the field, represents a weakness in the volume, as the adoption of the same structure in each chapter appears to the reader as a repetition that diverts attention. Even from a content perspective, examples of disinformation inevitably recur, as they are recorded in more than one state. The problem is mainly on the content side since the examples of disinformation recorded in individual states are inevitably repeated. These in fact mostly concern disinformation campaigns carried out on major social media during elections or the use of hashtags on the same platforms. The structure of the book suggests that there are qualitative and structural differences in disinformation campaigns in each state, when this does not seem to be the case. A more organic and fluid structure might have involved dividing the research findings by thematic areas rather than by individual states, especially since digital space and disinformation campaigns cross national borders. Focusing only on states could result in overlooking this transnational aspect of the issue.
Beyond these criticisms, the book’s contribution to the academic literature on disinformation is substantial and should attract the attention of readers and scholars interested in the issue of information freedom in today’s increasingly attacked and manipulated digital context. Among the strengths, beyond the accuracy in the in-depth study of a phenomenon that is as well-known as underexplored with reference to the African continent, is the idea that in situations characterized by internal disorders and weak protection of human rights, digital disinformation can produce even more serious consequences than it would normally produce in other parts of the world. It should also not be underestimated how in some cases this phenomenon is also precisely fueled by Western influences that overlook the precariousness of the context in which they go about their actions.
Susanna De Stefani is a PhD Student in European Union Law at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and an Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy.
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