On September 13, many were surprised when the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appeared in place of the usual spokesperson, Matthew Miller, for the daily press briefing. Blinken listed a series of grievances about the influence of Russian media before declaring that African Stream (AS), a popular pan-African social media platform, was being run by the state-funded RT (Russia Today). He read out African Stream’s mission—“providing a voice to Africans at home and abroad”—before claiming it, in fact only gave a voice to “Kremlin propagandists.” Shortly after, AS was “zucked,” getting taken down from Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, maintaining only a website and an X presence.
“It was a shock,” says African Stream’s CEO, Ahmed Kaballo, a Nairobi-based British-Sudanese journalist. “We weren’t even able to appeal or anything.” Blinken provided no evidence to support his claim, yet Kaballo suddenly found himself with very few avenues to reach the platform’s audience of well over a million followers. Kaballo rejects Blinken’s accusation, insisting that AS has no ties to Russia and is instead funded by private donors who support its work. He believes the reason they are being targeted is due to the impact his team of reporters, producers, journalists, and activists are having on public opinion.
The trouble began, he explains, when Onyx Impact—a non-profit organization that describes itself as “founded to better serve and empower Black communities by combating harmful information ecosystems targeting them”—alleged that AS was spreading “misinformation.” This claim was then repeated by NBC News without additional reporting or scrutiny.
In August, after the platform published a post about US airstrikes in Somalia, describing them as a “bipartisan tradition.” Voice of America, which is funded by the US government, also published an opinion piece disguised as a news report, staunchly defending the US position. The article wrongly described the AS post as “false” with a huge red X and presented the US’s reasoning for the strikes, rather than actually refuting African Stream’s post that both parties had bombed Somalia. “The US conducts drone strikes in Somalia to protect civilians from the terrorists,” it stated, almost speaking on behalf of the US instead of attributing the statement.
Just for context, the US began striking Somalia in 2003 and since then there have been two Republican presidents (Bush & Trump) and two Democrat presidents (Obama & Biden). Regardless of the efficacy or reasoning for the strikes (it should be noted successive Somali governments have requested them), both parties have bombed Somalia.
This culminated in Blinken giving what Kaballo has said was the “marching orders” to its social media organizations to silence AS. He sees it as both a point of pride and an important lesson about the risks of overreliance on Western platforms, which are ultimately beholden to their governments, Kaballo says. He speaks to Faisal Ali about the shutdown and the importance of anti-imperialist voices in African media.
