Thread by @tommymiles

By tweeting about Niger/Chinese relations I’ve accidentally discovered an African focused propaganda bot farm. All pretend in to be Ghanaian but all sending identical tweets painting Chinese businesses as exploiters of Africa, especially Ghana & not interacting.

They all have a handful of identical topics, use a handful of identical pidgin words, all pretend to be Ghanaian, all focus on anti-China accusations. Except some suddenly lurch into poorly copied French to support Azawad vs Mali & post anti-Russian/Wagner stuff

Why Ghana? Well, there’s a growth in Chinese business deals there but not outside the norm. What is different is US interests in Ghana, which is often the 1st stop for USAians on the continent. There’s a pile of US think tank panic articles to this effect medium.com/the-diplomatic…

That whoever is running this bot farm is also using the same accounts to try and influence the Malian civil war is perhaps a tell. Some accounts switch character between the two, but most are either playing at being Ghanaian or Malian (or Azawadi) See previous.

The “Malian” accounts follow each other, don’t interact, tweet in good French with occasional mashups of words from copy/pasting text together, occasional links are in English, and are focused entirely on Russia/Wagner.

This one is a good example, but you can find others by picking out the second sentence & searching.

Most but not all of these pose as supporters of the Malian government who want the government to end Russian military assistance. This would seem to exclude French interests.

Again, this seems a smaller pool of accounts than the Ghanaian bots, but they display the same copypaste text, and the fact some of the larger pool of “Ghanaian” anti-Chinese bots switched to this Mali/Azawad anti-Russian identity gives us clues of a larger operation.

My guess—& it’s a guess—is this is an outsourced US military operation. The unrelenting US professional think tankers obsession with “Russian influence operations” over the last decade has spawned numerous how-to studies, budget lines, all rather overestimating its effectiveness.

These two stories seem relevant. AFRICOM has since its inception been heavily invested in “Information Operations” having early on run an entire African news website called Maghrebia. IO specialists were last year doing trainings in Ghana. army.mil/article-amp/27…

On AFRICOM’s older iteration of IO, predating the last decade’s popularity of “countering cyber Russian influence” which has since fed a thousand Washington think tanks. nationalguard.mil/News/Article/2…

defensescoop.com/2024/10/15/arm…

congress.gov/crs_external_p…

In fact, AFRICOM’s 2024 Posture Statement, used to justify its budget, explicitly says its Information Operations aim to “shed light on Russian disinformation and the risks of partnership with unregulated Chinese industries.” Which precisely describes these accounts’ focus.

AFRICOM is nothing if not entrepreneurial, and one side effect of this is that it is much better at finding budget items to sell to Congress than producing actions which have any real effect on African societies.

So this seems like a reasonable guess.

africom.mil/document/35430…