The coup doesn’t need soldiers anymore: Social media and the new assault on African democracy

One of the most efficient ways to destabilise a nation today needs no soldier, a smartphone, a grievance, and an algorithm hungry enough to reward whichever one spreads fastest, because attention curdles into perception, perception into trust, and trust is the raw material legitimacy is built from.

The same algorithmic machinery that tears a state down elsewhere is, there, also being used to manufacture one man's legitimacy: the Africa Center for Strategic Studies has traced a coordinated, AI-driven campaign of deepfakes and bot networks, orchestrated by President Ibrahim Traoré's own brothers, who run the junta's digital economy and communications portfolios to inflate his image across the continent, running alongside genuine reforms and a genuine crackdown on the press covering them.

Every seat at that table, elders included, carries the same discipline fixed terms, a plural bench rather than one voice, and an appeals path outside its own authority.