Every election season brings a fresh wave of digital chaos. A single WhatsApp message, written in a panic and forwarded dozens of times, can convince people that a candidate has withdrawn, that ballot boxes have been stuffed, or that soldiers from a neighboring country have crossed the border. A manipulated TikTok video can show a leader saying something they never said, while an urgent breaking-news alert on Facebook, designed to look perfectly authentic, can push citizens into the streets. In democracies around the world, such falsehoods corrode the very idea of informed consent. Africa is no exception. As artificial intelligence…

Since Russia’s 2008 incursion into Georgia—and arguably even earlier—the Kremlin’s approach to propaganda has changed in ways that are both deeply familiar and radically new. It borrows from the Soviet playbook, with its love of obfuscation and its ambition to make targets act in Moscow’s interests without realizing they are doing so. But it also exploits the modern information environment in ways the Cold War generation could never have imagined: the Internet, social media, 24-hour news channels, and a sprawling ecosystem of amateur and professional outlets. Researchers at the RAND Corporation have given this model a memorable name: “the firehose…