In solidarity: This group of protesters condemning violence against young people in Kenya, do so at a time when illegal and unconstitutional
detentions are common and crackdown legislation is consistently used to block peaceful gatherings in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Photo: Ezekiel Aminga
In July 2024, a 24-year-old Ugandan TikToker received a six-year prison sentence for insulting Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and his family in videos.
That same month, a former government official faced similar charges for postings on X criticising the Speaker of Parliament. These prosecutions mark a rising pattern: as elections approach across Africa, the distance between digital civic space and state power grows.
Big Tech platforms have become the continent’s civic infrastructure, reshaping political visibility and participation in ways unimaginable 20 years ago.
Almost 15 years ago, we witnessed the Arab Spring, which spread widely due to social media. Yet these platforms operate mostly according to design logics and commercial imperatives built for Western markets, creating a profound asymmetry.
African publics depend on platforms whose governance structures remain largely opaque and unaccountable to the users whose political and social lives they now impact and influence.
In Africa, 384 million people now use social media, representing 8% of global users but growing rapidly. This expansion coincides with shrinking offline civic space.
Opposition figure and their supporters continue to face frequent beatings during gatherings, while illegal and unconstitutional detentions are common and crackdown legislation is consistently used to block peaceful gatherings in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Traditional media faces parallel pressure. Broadcast licences get suspended. Journalists face intimidation and numerous assaults. The spaces where Africans once debated governance publicly have systematically closed.
So the digital platforms have filled the void. In Kenya, young citizens mobilised through the #RejectTheFinanceBill protest in 2024. THRAETS, a civil society organisation, documented over 5,000 tweets analysing coordinated narratives and disinformation tactics.
Yet between June and December that year, activists documented over 80 abductions
Some victims were tortured. Some were killed for challenging their government online.
In Nigeria, the #EndSARS movement in 2020 demonstrated social media’s capacity to mobilise mass protests against police brutality. The government’s response? They banned Twitter (now X) for seven months.
Platforms do not simply host discussions. Their algorithms and monetisation models decide which stories spread, who gains influence and what trends.
Verified accounts wield disproportionate power because of algorithmic weight. Coordinated bot armies generate fake engagement to amplify particular agendas.
Politicians weaponise these dynamics continent-wide. Data-driven microtargeting allows campaigns to deliver tailored messages without the scrutiny traditional political advertising receives. Paid influencers operate without disclosure requirements, blurring the line between organic discourse and sponsored content.
The manipulation goes deeper. During Nigeria’s 2023 elections, generative AI fuelled fake endorsement from prominent figures.
In Senegal’s 2024 presidential race, a viral video purporting to show President Bassirou Diomaye Faye turned out to be AI-translated footage of a different politician.
In Mali, fabricated content frames the UN as perpetrators of insecurity, with AI-generated videos amplifying pro-junta messaging.
Troll accounts and outrage-driven content get algorithmic priority because they generate engagement metrics, regardless of whether they contribute to democratic discourse
Platform content moderation struggles across African contexts. Research demonstrates that even with automated tools and large language models, platform governance falls short due to linguistic blind spots.
Limited African language coverage means harmful content circulates undetected, while legitimate political speech in local languages potentially faces moderation.
In early 2025, Meta announced it was ending third-party fact-checking. The announcement shocked the digital policy space, especially since Africa Check screens for 100,000 enquiries annually, providing essential services platforms have failed to replicate.
Google and Meta own significant portions of Africa’s digital infrastructure, including the submarine cables connecting the continent to the global internet. They frame this as philanthropy— “connecting the last billion.” But it continues historical resource extraction patterns, now targeting African data rather than minerals.
The platform-state relationship complicates accountability further. It functions as a convenient partnership, where platforms supply states with citizen data for the purpose of “security”.
CIPESA, an ICT policy think tank, has documented how platforms facilitate state surveillance, transforming from neutral infrastructure into instruments of digital authoritarianism.
During South Africa’s 2024 elections, the Legal Resources Centre requested action plans from Meta, Google and TikTok.
All three refused, claiming South African information laws do not apply. Nigeria’s Electoral Commission sought platform help combating misinformation during the 2023 elections. While Meta offered limited support, they could not handle the spread
In Nigeria, research on “Data Boys” revealed how influencers covertly promote political leaders on Facebook, using algorithms to amplify partisan content without disclosing their ties.
Uganda’s recent experience offers a window into these continental dynamics. The country has 21.9 million internet users, with 78% being politically active youth.
When Facebook was banned during the 2021 elections, X emerged as the primary space for political engagement. Journalists host audio conversations, drawing thousands who discuss governance failures in real time.
Toward the 2026 polling day, a citizen-led group created their own polling station locator, more detailed than the Electoral Commission official website platform.
The government shut it down. The developers were arrested. The message was clear: civic tools operating outside official control will be suppressed, no matter how useful.
The government has layered digital control mechanisms over years. A 2018 social media tax required users to pay 200 Ugandan shillings daily to access platforms.
The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) issues threats against creators for violating “public morality”.
Media houses face warnings that staff online conduct could cost broadcast licences and some journalists have since been suspended from duty at the request of UCC.
Our ongoing study analysed nearly one million posts across X, Facebook and TikTok from July to December 2025. TikTok accounted for over 800,000 posts, demonstrating its dominance.
The research documents prevalence, coordinated information campaigns and the rising significance of influencer culture in political mobilisation.
Particularly striking is the documented use of Grok, X’s AI chatbot, especially among users under 25. Grok recently focused on promoting tech-based gender violence when users started processing explicit content about women.
Prompts involving women frequently produce responses including nudity or sexually objectified imagery, creating a hostile environment that disproportionately affects women’s participation in political discourse.
The 2026 elections showed how platform manipulation evolves. Our research reveals coordinated behaviour that does not align with organic engagement.
Unlike 2021, where inauthentic behaviour was readily identifiable, influence operations appear to be less visible in 2026. Better concealment techniques pushed manipulation into subtler forms: workarounds in local languages, coded language evading automated detection, strategic use of humour and satire shielding partisan messaging and indirect messaging maintaining plausible deniability.
These adaptive methods make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between genuine political expression and orchestrated manipulation.
Arrests of social media users for political speech continue across Africa. But so do the hashtags, the live audio debates on X Spaces and the live, uncensored coverage of events occurring through Facebook Live and TikTok Live, as well as YouTube broadcasts and podcasts, which have replaced traditional media that largely engage in self-censorship due to strict regulations, which enable crowdsourced documentation of governance failures.
This duality reveals platforms’ strange position in Africa’s networked publics: they enable new forms of political expression while creating new vulnerabilities to state repression and algorithmic manipulation.
The question is not whether platforms shape African political life. They do, fundamentally and irreversibly. The question is whether this influence will be held accountable in ways that make sense for Africa or if it will continue to follow business goals and rules made for very different political and economic situations.
African markets need to be just as open as other markets, with clear reports on moderation decisions and algorithmic systems. Regulatory frameworks must hold platforms accountable without enabling authoritarian control.
The House Seshat is an African knowledge management institute committed to centring African thought in the making of culture, policy and power.