Imagine finding out that one of your favourite columnists on your favourite news website, whose writing you have come to like over the past year, does not exist. Now, imagine finding out that not only does that columnist with the name not exist, but also that a dead person’s identity has been stolen to create them. This perfectly describes the Grégoire Cyrille Dongobada case from the Al Jazeera investigation. Dongobada authored more than 75 articles over two and a half years across more than a dozen West African countries, claiming to be a supposed geopolitical expert based in Paris. This documented tactic of information deception is even more dangerous because it hijacks a fragile African media infrastructure to carry it out.
While manipulating information to influence audiences is not new, the sophistication appears to be. Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), is the “intentional and coordinated activities carried out by state or state-linked actors, aimed at manipulating the information environment in a deceptive, misleading, or coercive manner with the objective of undermining public trust, weakening democratic processes, and advancing geopolitical goals”.
Where previous FIMI strategies, such as bots, were easier to spot and counter, more recent approaches are growing increasingly sophisticated and much harder to detect. This is true of the ghost reporter system, which succeeds because it exploits three things simultaneously: the economic precarity of small African media outlets willing to publish paid content cheaply, the linguistic and cultural authenticity that a local or regional byline lends to a story, and the technical blind spots of platforms designed to detect bot behaviour rather than human-mediated laundering.
From Bots to Humans: The Evolution of FIMI
For the better part of the last two decades, the application of bots on the internet has steadily grown. As of 2024, several sources estimated that bots accounted for more than half of internet traffic, with Statista placing the figure around 61%. There are many kinds of bots, and they serve a wide range of purposes online — chatbots (for digital customer service), web crawlers (data collection), as well as malicious bots (spambots, phishing, identity theft, etc.).
From an influence operation perspective, malicious bots have been an effective tool for advancing specific agendas on social media for at least a decade. This 2021 study found that bots are employed to ‘harass, mislead, & polarise’. There have been several reports highlighting instances of bots employed internally to control populations and externally to influence other societies. While the most widely cited instances are of Russian origin with the earliest instance going as far back as 2003 with Russian web brigades, several countries around the world have employed bots to achieve their set goals.
For instance, in 2018, the BBC reported that political parties in Mexico were using bots and fake accounts with the goal of influencing voter behaviour and spreading false stories in the lead-up to the country’s presidential elections. Similarly, this 2018 study found that bots were employed for political communication purposes in the 2016 US elections. In 2022, Elon Musk, in a bid to walk back his initial agreement to purchase the social media platform, claimed that more than 20% of Twitter’s active users were spambots although Twitter executives at the time put the number at “less than 5%”. Either way, it revealed the role bots now play in today’s social media interaction landscape.
Since the age of Cambridge Analytica, there has been a gradual shift towards more believable online influence approaches. Likely a response to users becoming increasingly aware and wary of bots online. Rather than creating fake social media accounts, this approach creates fake bylines. A middleman pitches pre-written articles to cash-strapped local outlets under fake bylines. In many cases, limited verification processes linked to resource constraints mean these articles are published without deeper scrutiny. According to the Al Jazeera investigation, most of these interactions are conducted via WhatsApp. The investigators found more than 15 of such “ ghost writers” with at least 200 articles published since early 2021 across 12 African countries. This also corroborates a 2024 report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies mapping the surge of Russian-backed disinformation in Africa and finding instances of influence operations in more than 30 African countries.
Aldu Cornelissen, co-founder of Murmur Intelligence, a South Africa-based organisation which analyses social networks, described the media strategy as a “global network of key accounts that are interwoven with other key accounts in the African context.” It is from this global network that “local influencers” in each country adopt and adapt the messages and narrative to suit their specific local context. These local distributors are paid small amounts (sometimes the equivalent of $11-15$) to post or submit content that carries the linguistic and cultural credibility of an authentic local voice. The sum of money, while not a lot in real terms, is significantly more than many journalists in the region earn for their work.
Why Africa’s Media Ecosystem is an Easy Prey
The ghost reporter system exploits a structural vulnerability that is global but even starker on the African continent. African newsrooms, like their global counterparts, operate under challenging sustainability conditions. Advertising revenue has migrated to digital platforms, donor funding is competitive and often short-term, and subscription models remain nascent in many markets. The result is newsrooms running lean: fewer staff, less time for verification, more reliance on contributed and freelance content to fill editorial gaps.
However, while these conditions are similar globally, in many West African countries, the gap between what outlets earn from advert placements and other sources and what a foreign-funded network is willing to pay is often significant. Within this context, the pre-written articles become economically difficult to refuse. The ghost reporter approach works because it targets local news platforms that are often understaffed, underfunded and in need of content. The articles are often pre-written and focus on specialist topics, such as security, geopolitics, and elections, where small newsrooms are less-equipped to offer adequate coverage or scrutiny. In essence, the system exploits the need for convenience.
This system is a growing concern across Africa, but particularly in the West African subregion, where surging security challenges and political instability present a fertile ground for information manipulation. In 2024, the French agency Viginum, together with the UK Foreign Office and the EU External Action Service EEAS, identified Nigeria as the central hub of pro-Russian activity on the continent. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies estimates that disinformation campaigns seeking to manipulate African information systems have surged nearly four times since 2022.
Implications for Media Trust and Media Literacy
When a reader in Lagos, Accra, or Yaoundé discovers that a columnist they followed for months was a fabricated persona funded by a foreign government, the effect goes beyond that one reader, columnist or media platform. It seeps into their perception of every byline, every outlet, and every news item read. Trust in local media erodes, and confidence in journalism is undermined, creating a vacuum that is easily filled by the sheer volume of unverified information flooding users’ timelines daily.
Lois, Assistant Editor at DUBAWA, a fact-checking platform, notes that the consequences stretch across public health, elections, and conflict. “When fake election analysts or observers claim elections were manipulated, they influence public perception of the electoral process, leading to distrust in the system.”
But framing this purely as a media integrity problem risks understating the problem. It is also a low media literacy and a sovereignty problem in that foreign actors are influencing domestic narratives. According to UNESCO’s October 2025 brief on the global state of media and information literacy (MIL), overemphasis on digital skills with little emphasis on critical thinking is one of the major challenges of MIL the world over. Africa fares worse than most regions because of significant disparities in MIL competencies and how they are integrated into educational systems. According to a 2024 study by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), titled Misinformation Policy in sub-Saharan Africa, this is due to inadequate infrastructure, low literacy skills, and grossly underfunded education systems.
Within the ghost reporter context, this increases the likelihood that fake bylines would go undetected because being technologically savvy is only one of the skills required to counter FIMI activities. There is a great need for audiences to exercise critical thinking informed by an awareness of the issues when engaging with information. This is not a call for audiences to be hypercritical, as this could be a gateway to digital nihilism, a state of mind resigned to the idea that truth no longer exists online.
At the level of media outlets, verifying experts through meetings, contacting affiliate institutions, and reviewing their histories are necessary but not enough. They place the burden of a state-backed, continent-wide influence operation on the shoulders of already underfunded newsrooms.
The response needs to match the scale of the threat. This means coordinated investment in regional verification infrastructure, stronger platform accountability for content laundering that falls outside bot-detection parameters, and donor and government support for the kind of investigative capacity that exposed the Dongobada network in the first place.
But crucially, media and information literacy demands an urgent rethink and reframing to adequately address the dynamism of the current and emerging challenges. On the one hand, there’s a need for audiences to be better equipped to ‘“sus out” disinformation in its varying and evolving forms. And on the other, a more system-wide, holistic approach is needed to design and test the best ways to address growing media “exhaustion” or cynicism among audiences.
