Issue No. 411

The rise of fake news in Somalia and its risk to the government 

Traditionally, Somali society has been an oral one, in which information was passed by word of mouth. There is a Somali saying, dhagaxna meel dhow dhawaqna meel dheer: actions reach a short distance while words can travel very far, very quickly. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database, in 2010 there were only about 640,000 mobile phone users in Somalia. A decade later, there were around 8.8 million mobile phone users. Nearly 22% of these users – 1.9 million people – were estimated to have internet access. As internet access has increased, the number of Somalis using social media platforms has increased in lockstep, resulting in substantiaål annual growth of social media platform users. Studies have found that 13% of Somalia’s total population – more than two million people – are active users of social media, a number which continues to increase each year.

Rising internet access is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it improves access to services such as education, with universities and schools, offering educational platforms through the internet. Various economic sectors are thriving thanks to internet connectivity; Somalia’s money transfer companies and banks rely on internet access to offer their services. There is no doubt that the internet has been a major catalyst for development and improved the standard of living for millions of Somalis. 

But there are many downsides to the internet, one of which is dis/misinformation (the difference being that disinformation is deliberately false and misleading; misinformation is just incidentally so) and the manipulation of public opinion. And the problem is hardly limited to Somalia; globally, dis/misinformation (often simply called ‘fake news’) has achieved pandemic proportions. And it is Åspecially rife in the political sphere.

In Somalia’s recent election, both the government and the opposition used social media to promote themselves and disparage their opponents, often by disseminating is/misinformation. While such behaviour is nothing new in politics, whether in Somalia or anywhere else, what was novel was the industrial scale of the effort. 

Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo campaigned for president in 2017 as an opposition figure. As one of the weaker candidates, he used his Tayo Political Party (TPP) to engage the youth, deploying nationalistic rhetoric. Behind the scenes, Farmaajo was the only candidate to create a formal social media campaign team, employing proper social media metrics and performance tracking measurements. His social media team started to create troll accounts with paid advertisements on social media platforms. Soon, Farmaajo’s nationalistic messages started to appear on every social media user’s account. 

After winning the presidency, Farmaajo realised how crucial social media had been for his victory. He kept his social media team intact and continued to use social media platforms to craft the image of his administration or to attack opponents. As the public became aware of how much the administration was leaning on the media – and especially social media – to shape reality, they nicknamed it igu sawir: a ‘photo opportunity.’

The culture of dis/misinformation continued, but it was often insidious and frequently went unnoticed as it percolated into the public’s consciousness, even as the faltering regime ramped-up its efforts to manipulate perceptions and opinion. Farmaajo allocated additional funding for and assigned members of his inner circles to oversee the social media propaganda machine he had created. And, increasingly, they sought to control traditional media as well, either by co-optation or censorship, including outright repression, as journalists were harassed and arrested, and their outlets threatened with closure. Access journalism became one of the few ways for media outlets to get inside Villa Somalia.

During periods of crisis, Farmaajo used the media and social media to divert public attention. For example, in 2018, the UN SRSG Nicholas Haysom questioned the misconduct of the UN-funded police against protesters, after demonstrations broke out in Baidoa following the government’s arrest of Mukhtar Robow, a former Al-Shabaab deputy leader and a South West State presidential candidate. Security forces killed around 15 people and arrested more than 300. Farmaajo’s government declared Haysom PNG and expelled him. Putting their propaganda machine into high gear, they were able to shift the narrative away from what had happened in South West State and redirect it against Haysom’s supposed violation of Somalia’s sovereignty. Haysom, and not Robow or the dead protestors, became the dominant story. This quickly became the Farmaajo administration’s default crisis-management playbook: stir up nationalist sentiment, find a target for it, divert attention from the actual issue. If they could control the narrative, then facts were largely irrelevant.Despite losing his bid for re-election, Farmaajo’s social media team still remains intact, led by a former Villa Somalia spokesman and other figures. The troll farms they built up over five years still exist, too, based not just in Somalia but among the Somali diaspora in Kenya, Turkey, Europe, and North America. Many of them continue to be paid thousands of dollars each month for their work. And they have been busy earning their money of late.

They started the “Thank you, Mr. President” campaign to raise funds to buy Farmaajo a mansion in Mogadishu. They have amplified interviews given by two former NISA directors to pro-Farmaajo media outlets, in which one of the officials, Fahad Yasin, made outlandish, unsubstantiated accusations against members of the new administration. Most recently, when members of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s delegation to the UAE tested positive for Covid-19 this week, they churned out dis/misinformation, claiming that HSM had Covid-19 and was being kept in isolation by the Emiratis or that the whole thing was a ruse and HSM had secretly flown to Israel to normalise Somali Israeli relations. 

If anything, pro-Farmaajo social media is even more dangerous now. Freed from having to expend time and effort defending the former president, they have gone on offense. Those on the receiving end of their brickbats have to decide whether to ignore them or address their false claims. For example, it was only last night that, facing a torrent of dis/misinformation about HSM’s health, Villa Somalia published photos of him meeting the UAE president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

Reliable sources have told Sahan that the money raised for Farmaajo’s mansion will instead be invested in local businesses and used to fund his social media campaign. It is time for HSM’s government, together with the platforms that give them a voice, to deal with the scourge of social media trolls, while respecting constitutional rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. 

The Somali Wire  Team