Social Media and the Reconfiguration of National Security in Africa

This essay is adapted from an intervention I gave at the Mashariki Cooperation Conference, which took place in Diani, Kenya, from the 8th-11th April 2026.

Social media has become part of Africa’s security architecture, whether nations are ready or not. It is part of how publics mobilise, how narratives are contested, how external actors intervene in matters of the state, how panic spreads, how evidence circulates - or is even created, and how legitimacy is won or lost.

Social media has therefore become part of the terrain on which national security itself is produced, challenged and judged. Despite this, many security conversations still treat social media as an external irritant: a channel through which misinformation travels, or a source of instability to be contained. But in practice, across Africa social media now shapes public sentiment, diplomatic perception, crisis escalation and institutional trust. In other words, it affects not only what governments know, but whether citizens believe and trust them. And this is a national security question in the deepest sense.

In this essay, I set out five implications of social media for national security in Africa today, and thereafter offer five strategies that policy-makers and those in the intelligence community should prioritise.

Implication #1 - Social media collapses the distance between grievance and mobilisation

The first implication is that social media collapses the distance between grievance and mobilisation. In the past, states could often assume some lag between public outcry and coordinated action. That lag is shrinking. Mobilisation is now decentralised and, with the rising use of AI technologies, increasingly more emotionally charged. It can happen across platforms and without formal organisations. It can arise with little warning and with high adaptive capacity. However, this does not mean every online mobilisation is a security threat, or should be treated as such.

Implication #2 - Social media blurs the boundary between civic action and security disruptions

The second implication is that social media blurs the boundary between civic action and security disruption. This is one of the hardest issues for governments. A digital campaign may begin as legitimate democratic expression and later be enflamed and manipulated by actors with different agendas, including foreign actors. The Mashariki analysis of Kenya explicitly makes this point: protests may arise organically, but state and non-state actors can later exploit the digital environment to intensify instability. So the policy problem is not merely “how do we stop harmful content?” It is: “how do we distinguish democratic mobilisation from engineered disorder, without criminalising dissent itself?”

Implication #3 - Misinformation, disinformation and synthetic media are changing the information battlespace

The third implication is the one security officials are rightly most worried about: misinformation, disinformation and synthetic media are changing the information battlespace. At the close of the 2025 Mashariki Cooperation Conference, Kenya’s NIS Director General Noordin Mohammed Haji warned that rapid technological advances, developments on social media and digital activism had escalated security risks, and that misinformation and disinformation, especially when intensified by AI-generated content, had created a “war against truth”. The erosion of shared factual baselines undermines every society.

This is not just a Kenyan issue. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies reported in 2024 that documented disinformation campaigns in Africa had risen to 189, nearly quadruple the number reported in 2022, and argued that there is a strong link between the scope of disinformation and instability. Reports from CIPESA similarly warn that digital platforms have the primary habitat for disinformation, allowing political actors to operate at scale, and that AI is making bots, coordinated trolling, “influencers for hire” and other forms of coordinated inauthentic behaviour harder to detect.

The security question then becomes whether a state, media ecosystem, or public can still establish enough common truth to make credible decisions in a crisis. This is critical during elections and protests, but is being accelerated by AI and social media on all fronts.

Implication #4 - Bad responses to digital threats can deepen insecurity

The fourth implication is that bad responses to digital threats can deepen insecurity rather than reduce it. CIPESA makes the point that government efforts to stem misinformation and disinformation across Africa have often been counterproductive. Censorship, internet disruptions, and regressive laws suppress legitimate speech and limit access to credible information. All of this stifles democratic participation.

Shutdowns and blanket restrictions create information vacuums. They not only break trust, but they obstruct fact-checking and make rumours more powerful. From a security perspective, they deprive authorities themselves of the visibility that open digital ecosystems can provide.

Implication #5 - Social media is a source of intelligence, accountability and societal resilience

The fifth implication is that social media is also a source of intelligence, accountability and societal resilience. This is often underplayed in security circles. Social media can surface local warnings, real-time evidence, open-source intelligence, eyewitness testimony, and patterns of abuse. CIPESA notes that grassroots movements and online communities are leveraging social media to amplify marginalised voices, advocate for social change, and hold political leaders accountable.

Accordingly, the security community should resist a purely deficit-based view of social media as inherently problematic. The problem is that institutions have not yet adapted to a world in which legitimacy is contested in public, in real time and often through digital intermediaries.

Five strategic points for national security in Africa

1. First, we should not treat platform governance as a purely domestic issue. Social media systems are transnational. Content, coordination, finance and influence operations move across borders. Africa therefore needs stronger regional coordination on threat intelligence, digital forensics, incident response and norms around electoral integrity and crisis communications.

2. Second, platform accountability has to become more specific. Platforms need to provide clear information on political advertising, more deliberate protections against misinformation and hate speech tailored to national and local contexts, transparency around content restrictions, and stronger safeguards for marginalised groups. These principles are well set out in the Principles and Guidelines for the Use of Digital and Social Media in Elections in Africa, jointly launched by the Association of Africa Election Authorities and the Electoral Commission of South Africa in 2024. It will also be important to recognise the problem of paid influencers, and operations of opaque political amplification.

3. Third, security institutions need better analytic capacity, not just stronger powers. The challenge is one of both volume and interpretation. Security agencies will need multilingual, locally grounded capacity to distinguish satire from incitement, civic anger from coordinated influence operations, and authentic grassroots mobilisation from astroturfing. Otherwise states either miss genuine threats or overreact to ordinary democratic speech. CIPESA explicitly notes that platforms and regulators still lag badly on local-context moderation and understanding.

4. Fourth, digital literacy is part of national resilience. If vulnerable communities are the most exposed to false information, then media literacy, civic education and trusted local communication systems are crucially important and should also be seen as security investments. CIPESA notes that communities with limited internet access and low media and information literacy are especially vulnerable to misinformation and exclusion.

5. Fifth, states should be very careful not to securitise every form of digital dissent. The risk in many countries is that “national security” becomes a broad label under which criticism, organising, whistleblowing and documentation of abuse are all treated as issues of destabilisation. That is a mistake. It weakens democratic legitimacy, and in the long run legitimacy is itself a security asset. Freedom House’s reporting on Kenya, and wider African evidence gathered by CIPESA, both suggest that repression of online space often produces more distrust, not less.

For Africa, the strongest national security strategy in the digital age will be one that can govern through openness, credibility and institutional trust while responding precisely to real harms in ways that protect society’s most vulnerable.

—————————————This analysis is based on research undertaken by the African Hub on AI Safety, Peace and Security, an AI4D project (Project Number 110880-002) funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.