Photo: Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Sept. 13 press conference. Screenshot from U.S. State Dept. Youtube
On Oct. 1, Gmail joined a long list of services to ban independent, pan-Africanist media outlet African Stream from its platform. This followed a Sept. 13 speech by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that escalated the information war against anti-imperialist media in Africa. Blinken accused by name Kenya-based outlet African Stream of being a propaganda vehicle controlled by Russia. African Stream — which had millions of followers across social media platforms, including over 900,000 on TikTok and over 800,000 on Instagram, has since been banned from all Meta-owned platforms as well as TikTok and YouTube.
Blinken claimed that Russia Today “secretly runs the online platform African Stream across a wide range of social media platforms.” “Now, according to the outlet’s website,” he continued, “‘African Stream is’ – and I quote – ‘a pan-African digital media organization based exclusively on social-media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad.’ In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.”
The U.S. government has, however, not provided verifiable evidence of these claims.
‘Foreign agents,’ a tired refrain
The State Department’s statement situates the attack on African Stream among similar attacks on a variety of independent and anti-imperialist media outlets all over the world. The Sept. 13 briefing also included attacks on RED media, claiming that the outlet was responsible for organizing pro-Palestine protests in Germany. In the last year in particular, countless independent outlets, journalists, and activists have seen their access to key information platforms restricted, banned, and otherwise hindered.
These tactics themselves aren’t new: there is a long history in the United States of racist, anti-communist witch hunts with major legacy media like the New York Times at the forefront of these inquisitions. Since 2016 and the thoroughly debunked “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory, any, even unsubstantiated, ties with so called “Russian State Media” has been used as a cudgel to silence voices and outlets critical of U.S. policy.
More recently, the focus of U.S. information war efforts has shifted to China, reviving the accusation that journalists and activists are actually, secretly, “foreign agents” of a hostile power. The Foreign Agents Registration Act has been deployed as a legal tool to restrict the operations of certain media companies within the United States historically, and especially since 2017 when Russia Today, CCTV, Sputnik and others were forced to register as foreign agents — a designation not forced upon, for example, AIPAC or Gulf state-funded think tanks.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the ground is being laid for a second “Russiagate,” or perhaps a “Chinagate” depending on the outcome in November. Earlier this year, Rossiya Segodnya, the parent company of Russia Today, was hit with additional U.S. sanctions. Two RT employees were indicted last month under FARA which continues this chilling trend. These legal actions are setting a precedent that can and will be extended to all types of media critical of the U.S. government anywhere in the world.
Tech monopolies extend U.S. power
What is most troubling about these attacks on African Stream is that it represents an expansion of U.S. information war and the extraterritorial powers wielded by U.S. based tech monopolies. The dictatorial control that tech capitalists hold over the flow of information worldwide is enabled by the monopoly power of these corporations.
There are very few, if any, viable alternatives for mass communication in the 21st century, but from Twitter to YouTube to Meta’s suite of platforms the information networks and communication channels that billions of people rely on the world over can be shut down, silenced, or blocked on the whim of a handful of ultra-wealthy Americans.
What this functionally means is that the U.S. government is able to enforce an information war entirely outside its own legal jurisdiction. Why should a media outlet based in Kenya, like African Stream, be subject to restrictions based on U.S. laws, U.S. sanctions, and U.S. political goals? Why should 1.5 billion Africans across the continent have their access to information restricted on the whim of State Department apparatchiks in Washington?
Beyond bans from social media platforms and other digital services, Wikipedia has now been weaponized in this smear campaign against African Stream. As of Oct. 1, the first sentence of the outlet’s Wikipedia article reads: “African Stream is an online media outlet that is described as a front for Russian disinformation operations, though it presents itself as a ‘Pan-African digital media platform covering affairs concerning Africans at home and in the diaspora’.”
Wikipedia has been an information battleground for years. The encyclopedia is edited by thousands of volunteers — however this simply provides cover for any actor with the resources to hire staff to do so to exert narrative control, from the far right to the Democratic Party establishment to actual intelligence agencies. Wikipedia is the first source of reference information for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the world.
One utility of speeches like Blinken’s on Sept. 13, as well as the smear campaign that preceded Blinken’s speech across mainstream media over the course of the summer, provides “citations” that give an air of credibility to further reporting (or in this case, for Wikipedia editors) which can cite them as evidence without actually having real evidence.
Africa in the crosshairs
There is more to the targeting of African Stream than simply the renewed Cold War against Russia and China. Africa is rapidly growing: in terms of population, economics, and global influence. Historically, U.S. imperialism has sought to crush any semblance of a pan-Africanist movement that could unite and develop the continent on its own terms and overcome the forced underdevelopment of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Since the 1990s, in the era of unipolar U.S. hegemony, pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist media was largely ignored by imperialist forces as inconsequential — this new wave of attacks on all fronts against such independent, socialist oriented media demonstrates the threat that people’s movements pose to imperialism in the 21st century.
In an article in the Black Agenda Report, Nigerian journalist and founder of West Africa Weekly David Hundeyin states that this attack means “We are doing something right.”
“The work that African Stream and others in the independent, Pan-Africanist media space are doing,” Hundeyin continued, “Is having a real effect in cutting through decades of foreign propaganda and raising the independent consciousness of the new generation of internet-savvy young Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.”
