Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor, September 25, 2024
- US efforts to control information in Africa will ultimately backfire, says African journalist, author, and filmmaker David Hundeyin.
On September 13, Secretary of State Tony Blinken held a press conference in which he accused the Russian media outlet RT of covertly disseminating Kremlin-produced content and messaging, not only in the US but also in Africa and other parts of the Western world. In particular he singled out African Stream, a PanAfrican media platform distributed via its website, AfricanStream.media, and on social media platforms. Prior to Blinken’s allegations, African Stream had 918,000 TikTok followers, 839,000 Instagram followers, 460,000 YouTube subscribers, 113,000 Threads followers, 99,000 Facebook followers, 68,000 X followers, 4,029 Telegram subscribers, and more followers on LinkedIn, Rumble, Reddit, and Patreon. Shortly after Blinken’s press conference YouTube suspended African Stream’s channel. Meta rapidly followed suit, suspending its accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Even Stripe, one of its digital donations processing services, suspended its account. On September 24th, as this edition of Black Agenda Report was close to publication, TikTok suspended their account as well.
No one had demonstrated that African Stream was spreading mis- or disinformation or that it had violated the rules of any social media company. All it took was Secretary of State Blinken’s order. In the course of demanding the censorship of African Stream, Blinken said he aimed to construct a “more resilient global information system,” which was obvious code for a US government-controlled global information dictatorship in which outlets and influencers, not only in Africa but also in the West, are censored for complicating Washington’s imperial objectives.
I spoke to David Hundeyin , Nigerian journalist, filmmaker, and contributor to African Stream, who had been scheduled to begin a biweekly podcast on African Stream’s YouTube channel in October.
ANN GARRISON: David, you wrote an essay “The Empire Finds an African Enemy: African Stream in the Crosshairs,” also published in this edition of Black Agenda Report. It situates this attack on African Stream within the centuries long, racist history of attempts to control Black consciousness globally. We don’t need to repeat what you said there, so I want to go into some of the technological nuts and bolts of how this is happening, some of which you described in a long post on the social media platform X, where you have a million followers.
But first I want to ask how much of the African population is under 30.
DAVID HUNDEYIN: It varies from country to country. In Nigeria, for example, the median age is 18.9. In Angola, it’s 16.5. Something like 70% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is under 30. So this is by far, by a very long distance, the world’s youngest population.
AG: And 93% of Africans now have cell phones. So I think we can assume that this young population is fairly tech savvy, even if they only have cell phones. Right?
DH: Yes, absolutely.
AG: Okay, I want to talk about the technology a bit. There are several ways of accessing the internet, one via the social media platforms, the largest of which have now banned African Stream, with the exception of Tiktok and X. X didn’t ban African Stream, although Stripe canceled its donations processing service, demonetizing it on X.
African Stream is supported by donations, some of which it’s now unable to access, correct?
DH: Amongst other things, yeah. As far as I’m aware, there are private donors who don’t necessarily use Stripe to donate. However, there’s also a very large community of people in the audience, who support our work. So it’s a problem because there were plans for expansion that were based, to a large extent, on revenue from the audience, much of which has now been frozen dead. So the team is going to have to figure it out. But the one thing I do know for a fact is that we’re not going to die, right?
AG: Well, so far as I can tell, you haven’t been banned on PayPal yet, although that could be coming, and as of today, your Patreon account appears to be up and running. Patreon seems to use Stripe for direct deposit payouts in the US, but also offers PayPal, Payoneer and other options. In any case, all these audience support options now seem precarious if not suspended.
But, as you said, you’re not going to die, so let’s move on to this long, complex X post about the US censoring information in Africa. It seemed complex to me because I didn’t understand all the technology, but you asked, hypothetically, what if China had taken a long list of measures to control information in Africa, then stated that the US had already taken or initiated them.
You said that the US controls Africa’s digital satellite TV broadcast market and that, in an act of naked imperialism, it had blocked RT from its airwaves. Can you explain how that works?
DH: There’s a single entity that controls pretty much all of Africa’s digital satellite TV market. It was a South African entity, but it’s been sold to Canal Plus , which is French. That’s the European supplier that fed the RT stream to MultiChoice .
Canal Plus was subject to the sanctions package imposed on Russia in 2022. So, as a result, it stopped streaming RT to MultiChoice.
AG: What is MultiChoice?
DH: The name of the organization is MultiChoice, but the name of the brand that we’re all familiar with on the ground is DSTV . So MultiChoice has 20.9 million DSTV subscribers across the continent, and because of US sanctions on Russia, these 20.9 million Africans stopped having access to RT. The European supplier, Canal Plus, cut the feed and there was nothing MultiChoice could do.
Why on earth does an extraneous entity have that much power over the information that Africans are allowed to have access to? Because the EU or NATO, or whoever it was, was very well aware that this European supplier supplies MultiChoice, which supplies a continental market with access to RT. So if you’re forcing this supplier to cut that feed, you are effectively cutting it off to an entire continent.
Do you have the right to do that? Did you consult anyone in Africa before doing that? Did you ask for our inputs? Did you ask for our opinions? Did you ask for our permission? No, you just did it, which is a sort of recurring feature of how Europe and the US relates with Africa when they consider something to be in their interests, even if their interests directly contradict those of Africans. They just do whatever the hell they want to do.
Then Africans can react however they want, but the Americans are not going to go back on what they’ve done.
AG: Some readers like myself may not completely understand the technology here, so I’m going to try to unpack it a little bit. According to AI- AI-generated information on the web, there are a number of companies with communication satellites delivering content in Africa. They include Intelsat, Avanti Communications, Starlink, Rascom and New Dawn. Now I must be missing something, because these don’t seem to be a single company. Can you explain that?
DH: Those companies that you’ve mentioned send communication of all kinds. So it’s internet traffic, telecoms traffic, TV, everything. So this entity that I referred to—MultiChoice—makes use of some of that infrastructure, which basically broadcasts satellite TV signals across the continent. MultiChoice doesn’t own any satellites, but they make use of satellite services to broadcast digital TV signals across the continent.
Let me think of an equivalent in the US, maybe HBO. So it’s basically what you refer to as cable TV. Multichoice is basically a cable provider with this large continental market. With 20.9 million subscribers, they’re by far the largest, practically a monopoly. Technically, there are other players in the space as well, but they control something like 85% of the market.
Now, as you may or may not be aware, most of the African market isn’t really able to afford cable TV. It’s a luxury. That’s how you have a continent with 1.4 billion people and MultiChoice has a near monopoly of only 20.9 million subscribers. Because they are a near monopoly, very few people have access to RT because it’s not in the package that’s delivered to them as DSTV.
Before the sanctions imposed on Canal Plus, their European supplier, it streamed RT to MultiChoice, and then they, in turn, relayed the RT signals across Africa. Canal Plus was instructed to cut the feed and stop sending RT streams to MultiChoice. So whether you’re in Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya, or South Africa, or anywhere except maybe Eritrea, you don’t have access to RT anymore. The only way you can access RT is to get it on the internet. If you’re using your MultiChoice DSTV TV package, you haven’t had access to it since the sanctions on Russia were imposed in 2022.
RT sends out a stream to a basket of entities who amplify or resell their stream to others. MultiChoice doesn’t work directly with RT. Okay, so RT works with a basket of suppliers including Canal Plus, who then market its product to retailers like MultiChoice or Sky TV or Comcast or whatever. So that supplier was instructed by—I don’t know if it was the EU or NATO—but shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they were instructed that as part of the sanctions package, they could no longer resell RT because RT was no longer permitted to financially benefit from participation in any market that they control. That’s still part of the sanctions package on Russia, because obviously RT is state-owned.
My problem with that is, if that was restricted to Europe, then that’s fine, because that was a sanctions package that the EU, NATO, and the US agreed to. So that’s their problem, but the US effectively added Africa to that sanctions package without Africa’s say so. We were not consulted. This actually led to a very high profile legal issue in South Africa, in which the South African government actually instructed DSTV to ensure that RT is returned to the package. The South African government said, “Look, we are not part of your sanctions package. So you cannot force South Africa to participate in sanctions on Russia. We weren’t consulted.”
DSTV responded that there was nothing they could do about it because they didn’t make this decision. The supplier catching the feed no longer made it available to MultiChoice/DSTV, so 20.9 million African DSTV subscribers, including South Africans, do not have access to RT, even though whatever is happening between Russia and its geopolitical rivals in Europe and the US doesn’t really have anything to do with us. That’s not our fight. But somehow, just by virtue of having our markets controlled or highly influenced by US and European players, we have been dragged into others’ information warfare without regard to our own opinions, positions or interests.
AG: Most or all Europeans also lost their access to RT with those 2022 sanctions, didn’t they?
DH: Most of Europe as far as I’m aware. Maybe parts of Eastern Europe still have access to it, maybe Serbia, which is not part of the EU or NATO, but as far as I’m aware, EU and NATO countries all lost access. If you’re a NATO member state, I believe it’s actually illegal to let RT broadcast.
And it goes beyond even broadcast. If you’re in a NATO member state, even the RT Twitter handle is blocked. If you try to go to it, you see a message that this account has been withheld from you due to a legal request.
AG: Would it be accurate to think of Canal Plus, the European supplier, as something of an aggregator, then MultiChoice as another aggregator?
DH: The European supplier is like an aggregator. MultiChoice is pretty much a retailer. Think of the European supplier as a wholesaler and MultiChoice as a retailer. Then DSTV is the brand that MultiChoice sells its stuff under. So your TV box, your decoder, isn’t labeled MultiChoice. It’s labeled DSTV, but DSTV is basically a brand of MultiChoice.
AG: OK, and as you said, the 20.9 million households getting DSTV are a tiny fraction of the 1.4 billion Africans on the continent.
DH: Yes.
AG: So how are the rest of Africans getting access to the internet?
DH: DSTV is a TV package, not an internet package, right? MultiChoice offers only TV. They don’t offer internet.
The vast majority of African internet access is mobile internet. Most Africans don’t have wired broadband. They have mobile internet, 3G, 4G, and to a lesser extent, 5G.
AG: And that’s via cell phones, right?
DH: Yes.
AG: And again, 93% of Africans have cell phones. I was in Ethiopia a couple of years ago, and I noticed that most everyone had a cell phone. I’d see people driving donkey carts who would pull cell phones out of their pockets. It seems to be the first piece of technology that people buy once they can afford it.
DH: Yes, 100%.
AG: So how can this be controlled? How can the US also control mobile information?
DH: Short answer, it can’t. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to try. There seems to be this idea now that the only way for the US to win this huge geopolitical conflict with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, is to drag everyone to war.
The US seems to have given up on the idea of out- competing everyone else, as it did for decades or centuries. It’s got the idea into its head that the only solution to everything now is war. And before you can start a war, you need to craft a narrative that gives you justification for going to war.
The very clear example of this is the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The Western information ecosystem curated around this thing makes it such that the vast majority of the Western audience, at least at the time of the invasion, was very much in favor of Israeli military action because the message that was put out was that this terrible thing called October 7 happened, right? What the Western population was not made to understand was that October 7 needs to be contextualized as part of something else that has gone on for 76 years, right? That’s how information warfare works. That information warfare was very successful. It’s actually still very successful, because, up until now, somehow, across most major Western media, the consensus remains that regardless of whatever atrocities the Israelis commit in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon or wherever, the Israelis are still the victims.
Meanwhile, there’s 70 odd years of data showing otherwise, but that’s how information warfare works. So the US seems to be of the idea that they may not be able to control all of the information as they once did, the part of the information that they can control will give them the justification to go to war and bomb everyone back to the Stone Age to regain their position as the undisputed, unchallenged global hegemon. They feel they still have the capacity to enact that much information warfare.
They specifically target voices and platforms like African Stream that have the ability to destroy the narratives that provide cover for war. There are a lot of media organizations and platforms that are sort of anti-American, but the US doesn’t normally go after them. The US doesn’t normally acknowledge them. But the ones that it specifically goes after are the ones that are either anti-war, anti-imperialist, or, especially in this instance, Pan- Africanist. For whatever reason, the idea of Pan-Africanism is something that has always made the US government absolutely lose its marbles.
The idea of Black people on both sides of the Atlantic coming together into some sort of political union absolutely terrifies the American establishment. Only they can explain why, but historically, that’s always been the case, and it seems like, even now, that has not changed.
I don’t think it’s going to work, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to try.
AG: In the United States, Americans feel so much that they have a right to free speech that government encroachment on it has been more gradual than in Europe. They shut down RT and Sputnik broadcasts, but our ISPs don’t block us from getting them as they do in Europe.
In your X post, you asked, “What if I told you that your African ISP in your African country will soon be subject by one or two degrees of separation to Americans laws forcing them to stop giving you access to certain information?”
DH: Yeah, this will be true of Internet Service Providers, which are basically mobile networks.
AG: But that’s not always your phone network, is it?
DH: In the African context it is, yes.
AG: You said earlier that you didn’t think it was going to work. But who’s saying that your African ISP will soon be subject to two degrees of separation from US censorship? Tell us what that means.
DH: There was a piece of legislation passed in your House of Representatives in 2022, H.R.7311 – the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act .
If you listen to Blinken’s press briefing on September 13th, he essentially made reference to it when he said that the US is building “a more robust global information system.”
This bill basically seeks to make it such that under the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the US government should have some sort of involvement and control over what content is allowed to be hosted not only on social media but also across the internet, what content should be promoted and what people should even be permitted to see. The point of this bill is to make it possible for the US government to prevent any information it disapproves of from being posted altogether, to remove it once it’s posted and even to take punitive measures against the poster.
At the very least, it says that information should be algorithmically suppressed, which, by the way, is something that already happens a lot on X. I have over a million followers on X, and generally speaking, up until maybe three months ago, I would post absolutely anything, and the minimum number of views I’d get would be something like 300,000. It was anything from 800,000 to a million plus more often than not. But ever since I seemed to come to the notice of the US government, these numbers have fallen off a cliff. The recent post that you’ve been referencing had something like 400,000 views, but it would have had no less than two million before.
So this is algorithmic suppression, where when an account has been flagged, the account holder’s ability to reach people is artificially suppressed. You’re not being censored or deleted; you’re still free to say what you want, but far fewer people are going to see it.
This measure is among the proposals that are made in this legislation, that through the use of AI, content can be curated without human involvement, because human moderators are very expensive and time-consuming. Using AI and machine learning, you can accomplish vast amounts of censorship, almost instantaneously. The House bill proposes funding appropriations to create this system for managing the flow of information globally.
Very crucially, the world’s most popular social media platforms, with the exception of TikTok, are all American. Twitter, or X, as Elon Musk has renamed it, is American. Meta is American. That’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.
Snapchat is also American. Reddit is American.
AG: Telegram and Rumble are also exceptions, not American owned.
DH: Yes, but the US still has this de facto control over most of the world’s information because most of the world’s information is physically domiciled on servers in San Francisco. The US is already using that power to physically dominate people’s access to information, and now its government proposes to use it a lot more.
This is something they’ve always accused, for example, the Chinese of doing, because the Chinese have this internet censorship system called Golden Dawn. And the US has always claimed that they’re not like the Chinese, that they believe in free speech, freedom of expression, that they don’t censor people. They have a free internet, unlike the Chinese, who block Google, Facebook, and other American platforms. Now the US is pretty much trying to become like China, but possibly worse.
AG: Yes, they say we have to block information to protect our freedom of information.
DH: Exactly. We have to kill you to save your life, right?
AG: When you said, in your X post, that these measures are all written down in granular detail and publicly accessible, this bill is what you meant, right?
DH: Yes.
AG: OK, now one more sort of technical question. You say that your African ISP, in your African country, will soon be subject by one or two degrees of separation to American laws. What are those one or two degrees of separation?
DH: So the idea is similar to the case of MultiChoice, which is not an ISP, but a TV service. It proposes to use the same principle by which MultiChoice has to purchase a feed from a European wholesaler, and in doing so, becomes subject to European or NATO rules. Indirectly, something similar is going to happen with African ISPs.
Consider, for example, an internet service provider that is built on a network that uses American or European infrastructure . . . let’s say Siemens. Siemens is German, but Germany is a NATO member. Imagine that your network infrastructure is built on this German infrastructure, and as a NATO member, Germany enforces some new sanctions that criminalize some type of information. What that could mean is that if you need Germans to come and do something, maybe service their equipment, which is a major thing, they can tell you that unless you adhere to US/EU/NATO rules, then your contractual agreement is broken, so they will no longer service your stuff, and then your network will break down.
So even though you’re not subject to American or European laws, just by virtue of having American and European stuff in your supply chain, you will have no choice but to fall into line. Officially, you’re not going to be subject to the US or to Europe, but in effect, that’s exactly what you will be. Because a lot of this technology is not local. A lot of it is just imported. It’s imported and so is the servicing that keeps it working.
It’s kind of like buying a plane. When you buy a plane, you own the right to use the plane, but everything that keeps the plane serviceable is pretty much still coming from the people you bought it from. So if you ever fall out with them, then your plane becomes a very expensive piece of scrap metal because you can’t fly it anymore. It’s the same principle with these ISPs.
Thankfully, a lot of the technology is also built on Huawei infrastructure, which is Chinese. So it’s a lot less likely that China, at this point in time, is going to weaponize its infrastructure in that way, but the Americans and the Europeans absolutely will, and they have signified that they’re ready and willing to do it. So there’s going to come a time when either all of Africa is going to have to pivot toward Chinese network infrastructure or subject themselves through that one or two degrees of separation to American and European laws.
AG: At this point African Stream is still available on the Web. You can still go to their website, even if you can’t find them on these major social media platforms, but they could make that impossible as well, just as they have made it impossible to get RT in Europe, right?
DH: Yes. Definitely, because even if you own your own website, you have to ask who’s hosting it? Is it Amazon? Because if it is, you don’t really own it. They can take you off at any time. All it takes is one court order. Or, as we’ve seen, you might not even need a court order. You might just need Blinken making a statement in front of a microphone.
AG: Okay, so you said this isn’t going to work, and you’ve hinted at why it won’t work. Chinese infrastructure in particular. Do you think that more Chinese social media platforms will take market share from the censored Meta and Google platforms in Africa, as TikTok no doubt has already?
DH: I’m not sure about that, mainly because with the exception of TikTok, they are mostly Mandarin-dominated and no serious overseas marketing effort has been made yet
AG: Tell us more about how Chinese physical infrastructure will keep US information warfare from working.
DH: Look at what the Israelis pulled a few days ago, for example, where they blew up a bunch of people’s devices remotely, and that was taken as some sort of big win. They showed that they could get you wherever you are. Well, in the 48 hours after the first attack—not even the second one— Chinese suppliers of smartphones, pagers, and walkie talkies couldn’t handle the demand that started pouring in from the Arab world. And a lot of these large orders coming in have one single instruction, and that is to shift the entire supply chain. The manufacturing process has to be all domestic in China. In other words, there has to be no opportunity for Israeli infiltration into the supply chain.
So, by performing that act of terrorism, Israel effectively pivoted a couple of hundred million people who used Western devices to Chinese manufacturers.
They probably haven’t seen the impact of this now, but probably in a year or two, the West will realize that sales of Western electronic products in these markets are going to absolutely fall through the floor, and sales of Chinese electronics are going to go through the roof. The Chinese were already very competitive, and their share of the market was growing, but this has basically gift wrapped an entire market to them.
I believe something similar is going to happen when the US starts trying to control information in Africa, because it’s kind of like what you refer to as the Streisand effect, where, in the process of trying to stop people from accessing something, you turn it into forbidden fruit and then everybody wants to have it.
AG: Yes, exactly. The US shoots itself in the foot again. It’s hard to imagine they don’t see that this is going to happen.
DH: Well, large bureaucracies have this funny way of repeating the same mistakes over and over. If you’ve read the story of the fall of the Soviet Union, you see parallels where something clearly is not working, but it’s organizational habit, and the organization seems to run on autopilot. Nobody can stop it.
Something similar happened in China up until the fall of Chairman Mao. In the later years of his rule, it was clear that the revolution that he desired in Chinese industry and society clearly wasn’t happening. A lot of his ideas were poorly conceived, and a lot of the stuff that he enforced simply didn’t work, but they just didn’t stop. He had to physically die before anything changed. That’s because large bureaucracies sort of get locked into a specific pattern of behavior, and then they become unable to extricate themselves from it until something big changes.
So if I were an American, I would actually be looking forward to some sort of black swan event that would act as a reset, such that a lot of these fundamental assumptions about US foreign policy and even domestic policy might be re-examined. The US government is like this large robot operating on autopilot, and nobody can do anything about it. It’s just determined to do what it’s going to do, even if it’s going to end up destroying itself.
AG: It can’t think in terms of anything but US hegemony, at least for now.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
DH: Let me have a look at my essay that BAR also published today.
My second point was that if you look at the full transcript of the Blinken press briefing, he referenced how, in the previous week, they had said something about American influencers, YouTubers, being used unwittingly to disseminate Russian propaganda. That word, unwittingly, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. And I don’t think people understood the implications of what he was saying, which was that these people are not deliberately spreading Russian propaganda, but being used without their knowledge. What that means is that anybody can be accused of being a Russian agent.
AG: Exactly. Including Black Agenda Report and Pacifica Radio, the network that I’m going to air the audio version of this conversation on.
David Hundeyin, thank you for giving so much of your time to Black Agenda Report.
DH: You’re welcome.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon .