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In late October 2026, a group of researchers, journalists, and civil society actors gathered in Dakar to confront a problem that no longer respects borders: the quiet, relentless erosion of trust through disinformation. The occasion was the presentation of a joint report by the Timbuktu Institute and the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, coordinated by Dr. Bakary Sambe and Agnieszka Cianciara. The title of the report is deliberately ambitious: Disinformation, Democracy and the Challenges of Stability and Security: What Shared Challenges for the Sahel and Europe? It asks a question that many governments would rather avoid, because the honest answer is uncomfortable. What happens in the information space of one region no longer stays there; the same manipulated images, the same recycled rumors, and the same polarizing narratives travel from Bamako to Warsaw, from Dakar to Brussels, feeding on whatever fractures they find. The meeting was supported by the Polish Embassy in Senegal, and it brought together people who actually work on the front lines of this problem: Momar Diongue, the director general of the Senegalese Press Agency; Alioune Tine, president of AfrikaJom Center; and Professor Ndèye Astou Ndiaye from Cheikh Anta Diop University, among others. The conversation was moderated by Hamadou Tidiane Sy, and it focused on a core insight that the report develops at length: disinformation is not simply a series of false stories that can be fact-checked away. It is an accelerator of crises, a force that slips into existing political and social tensions and magnifies them until they become something far more dangerous. The report does not pretend that manipulation creates these tensions from nothing. It simply shows how it gives them new reach, new emotional power, and new destructive potential.
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To understand what the researchers are saying, it helps to stop thinking about “fake news” as a harmless term for online confusion. Disinformation, in their view, is better understood as a kind of parasite that feeds on wounds already present in a society. It targets feelings of injustice, humiliation, exclusion, and fear. It amplifies them, twists them, and then directs them toward convenient enemies. The Timbuktu Institute has been documenting this process for years. Since 2024, its Observatory of Social Media in the Sahel and West Africa has been following the circulation of divisive content on platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, X, and Telegram. The researchers have watched how a single manipulated video can deepen ethnic suspicions, how a forged document can make people question the legitimacy of their own state, and how a steady stream of hostile narratives can make regional organizations like ECOWAS or the African Union look like instruments of foreign powers rather than instruments of collective security. More recently, the Institute published a study called Algorithms at War, which looked at how armed actors in Mali have begun using generative artificial intelligence to reshape the conflict. That study was a wake-up call, because it showed that the tools of disinformation are becoming more sophisticated, cheaper, and easier to deploy. This new report builds on that work, but it also expands the frame. It asks whether the Sahel and Europe, two regions that seem so different, are in fact facing versions of the same threat. The answer is nuanced. The contexts are different, the histories are different, and the vulnerabilities are not identical. But the underlying mechanism is recognizably similar: disinformation does not need to create a crisis from scratch. It only needs to find a fracture and widen it.
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One of the report’s most useful contributions is its careful distinction between ordinary political speech and what it calls Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or FIMI. This matters because not everything that annoys a government is foreign interference. Criticizing a foreign partner, questioning a development project, defending national sovereignty: these are all legitimate parts of political debate. What makes FIMI different is concealment. When the origin of a message is hidden, when its funding is opaque, when the actors behind it deliberately disguise themselves as something they are not, then the information space has been weaponized. In the Sahel, this kind of manipulation finds fertile ground. Young people are joining social media and encrypted messaging platforms faster than media literacy programs can reach them. At the same time, they are living through security crises, political transitions, and a growing distrust of traditional partners. Sovereigntist rhetoric, which can be entirely genuine, often gets mixed with fabricated tales and manipulated images. The result is an information environment where it becomes almost impossible to tell an authentic aspiration from an engineered influence operation. The report identifies three broad categories of actors involved in this space. First, foreign powers engaged in what is now a multipolar competition for influence. Second, armed terrorist groups such as JNIM and the Islamic State in the Sahel, which use information to recruit, intimidate, and legitimize violence. Third, national and transnational actors, including political leaders, influencers, and what the researchers call “influence entrepreneurs.” These groups do not always share the same interests, and they do not need a central command to coordinate their effects. Their narratives can converge naturally, feeding each other and producing a chaos that serves multiple agendas at once. The Russian ecosystem, which the report examines in detail, is a particularly clear example of how this works in practice. It combines state media, unofficial actors connected to the former Wagner network, agencies like African Initiative, and local relays who may or may not be aware of the larger operation. The strongest trick of this machinery is that it blurs the line between external production and domestic expression. A story manufactured abroad suddenly appears legitimate when it is repeated by a respected local outlet or attributed to a supposed expert. The influence does not come from replacing local narratives. It comes from amplifying them, redirecting them, and making them feel like the authentic voice of the people.
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What happens to a democracy when its citizens no longer know whom to believe? The report spends considerable time on this question, and the answer is sobering. Trust is not a cosmetic feature of democratic life; it is the foundation. When people are exposed to contradictory information, when they hear official denials that seem to contradict their own eyes, when they watch one narrative replace another without explanation, they begin to withdraw. They stop engaging with the facts. They start choosing sides based on identity, fear, or loyalty rather than evidence. The danger is not simply that individuals become confused. It is that society loses the shared reference points needed for debate, compromise, and collective judgment. Election periods are especially vulnerable. The report recalls a striking example from Senegal, where a fake poll attributed to a nonexistent research center circulated just five days before the presidential election of March 2024. Fact-checkers eventually exposed it, but the episode showed how easily a single fabricated artifact can insert itself into the most sacred moment of democratic life. In the countries of the Alliance of Sahel States, the pattern has been different but equally troubling. Social media accompanied the coups d’état and the reshaping of regional alliances. The narratives hardened over time. At first, Russia was presented as an alternative to Western partners. Then France, and the West more generally, was designated as the main cause of instability. Finally, accusations appeared claiming that Western powers were supporting terrorist groups. When such narratives are repeated by public officials themselves, the line between propaganda and official discourse begins to disappear. Meanwhile, the suspension of several international media outlets and growing pressure on local journalists have reduced the space for alternative voices. Pluralism weakens. The few counter-narratives that remain struggle to be heard. And disinformation thrives in exactly that silence, because it faces no competition, no correction, and no challenge.
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The report also makes clear that disinformation is not just a political problem. It is a security problem. For armed groups, information has become a weapon in its own right, as important as guns or explosives. It allows them to legitimize violence by exploiting local grievances. It helps them glorify their successes and hide their abuses. It spreads confusion through exaggerated casualty figures or recycled images taken from other conflicts. The Sahel offers many recent examples. In Burkina Faso, a video presented as showing the army fleeing from battle was actually filmed in Mali and reused during attacks in February 2026. Such content does not simply mislead people about a specific event. It can turn a whole community into a target, deepen feelings of injustice and exclusion, and push vulnerable individuals toward recruitment. At the same time, the rivalry between foreign powers is making the security situation worse. When one actor accuses another of supporting jihadist groups, attention is diverted from those actually carrying out attacks. Cooperation against terrorism weakens, even though the threat itself is cross-border and demands more coordination, not less. With JNIM putting pressure on western Mali and blockading supply corridors, these dynamics are now directly affecting coastal countries that were previously spared the worst of the violence. When the report turns to Europe, it finds a different landscape but a familiar logic. European societies are dealing with concerns about purchasing power, tensions around immigration, political polarization, and a deep skepticism toward national and European institutions. The specific issues are not the same as those in the Sahel, but the pattern is. Manipulation relies on a pre-existing crisis of legitimacy and then aggravates it. It depends on domestic relays who give foreign narratives an appearance of local authenticity. In Europe, this is sometimes called “narrative laundering.” The report warns against an exclusively repressive response. If the fight against manipulation becomes a way to silence critics, it will only feed the very distrust it claims to reduce. Protecting the information space requires distinguishing coordinated and concealed operations from investigative journalism and legitimate dissent. Restrictive measures must respect legal frameworks, proportionality, transparency, and necessity. Europe’s experience with countering FIMI offers useful lessons, but those lessons cannot simply be exported to different political, institutional, and media environments. Cooperation between the European Union, the African Union, and ECOWAS should be built on exchanged practices and jointly designed responses, not on imposed norms.
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In its final section, the report offers seven recommendations aimed at states, regional organizations, digital platforms, and civil society. It calls for a permanent cooperation mechanism between the European Union, the African Union, and ECOWAS to share information, monitor threats, and issue early warnings, especially during elections and crises. It asks for information dynamics to be integrated into early warning systems and for coordinated responses to foreign manipulation operations. It urges digital platforms to cooperate more closely on detecting coordinated campaigns, to make their recommendation systems transparent, to give researchers access to data, and to moderate content in national and local languages. It also calls for sustained support for independent media, fact-checkers, and media literacy initiatives, while preserving pluralism and fundamental freedoms. Finally, it insists on the need for joint research and evaluation so that the partnership can learn and adapt over time. Underlying all of this is a deeper conviction. No strategy against disinformation will work in the long term if it only fights narratives without addressing the grievances on which those narratives feed. If people feel genuinely ignored, humiliated, or excluded, no fact-check will convince them otherwise. The most solid response to an exploited injustice is to correct the injustice itself. Information resilience is therefore built on institutions that function, media that are free and independent, and citizens who are able to weigh competing discourses and form their own informed judgment. Senegal and West Africa have real resources for this effort: institutions that have weathered serious tensions, societies that are used to a plurality of voices, and a tradition of dialogue that still offers some protection against polarizing appeals. The challenge is to turn these assets into lasting capacities for prevention and response. In an information space where narratives travel faster than denials, vigilance cannot be the business of one state or one continent. It requires seeing earlier, coordinating better, and speaking accurately, down to the local languages where the battle for trust is fought every day.