Umbrae Ex Machina

Overview

Russia has been planting ghost reporters and fake experts in the African media landscape to advance its strategic interests on the continent since at least 2021. For this report, we consider ghost reporters to be bylines that are used to plant articles that primarily promote Russian interests in authentic African media outlets but are not linked to a genuine journalist. Fake experts are inauthentic personas invoking claims of authority – mostly specific academic backgrounds or expertise – who have quotes attributed to them in ghost reporter-written and authentic media articles.

The ghost reporters and fake experts we identified during our research primarily spread content revolving around terrorism and security in Africa. They also promoted some or all of the following:

• Anti-France, anti-Ukraine, or anti-U.S. content
• Content critical of regional and international organizations perceived as "pro-Western," such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
• Content promoting Russian interests in Africa through praising Russian paramilitary groups active in Africa, Russian-African friendship, Russia's beneficial impact on the continent, and sovereignty-focused regional initiatives such as the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).

The research builds on previous public reporting by international news outlets and organizations like Al Jazeera, France 24, and Code for Africa (CfA) that identified websites with active ghost reporters.

We used open-source techniques to expand our list of websites hosting ghost reporter content, and used text-based detection to identify new ghost writers. We detail our detection, verification, and attribution techniques below, as well as behavioral patterns we identified among said fake personas.

For this report, we specifically looked for ghost reporters who publish content in English- and French-language African outlets. Prior research by international non-profit organizations and researchers shows that these Russian-created ghost reporters are also active in Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, among others, and target other regions, such as Latin America. This report provides an overview of the English- and French-speaking network of ghost reporters active in Africa and is not an exhaustive list of Russian-created journalist personas and experts. Graphika and CfA collaborated to develop this report with support from Meta.

In total, we identified 44 ghost writers and fake experts, 38 of whom are high-confidence personas. These personas were active between 2021 and 2026, and their content was duplicated or quoted on 138 websites, and were republished on at least 113 Facebook accounts and pages belonging to real users, coordinated inauthentic networks, and Russian official communication pages.