Social media has become a key communication tool for terrorist groups across Africa, presenting governments with a challenge: how to restrict terrorist propaganda while protecting free expression.
The rapid spread of the internet across Africa has become a hodgepodge of national, regional and continental regulations that cause confusion, particularly when governments call on social media companies to shut down channels with ties to terrorist organizations such as al-Shabaab in Somalia or Boko Haram in Nigeria.
“A key challenge is that the lack of clarity on what constitutes ‘terrorist online content’ and what measures should be taken by relevant stakeholders can result in the improper classification of online content,” researcher Brenda Mwale wrote recently in the Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism.
In addition, social media companies lack moderators who understand African languages well enough to tell when a comment could be considered terrorist content. Terrorist groups such as al-Shabaab take advantage of those gaps to expand their audience.
Al-Shabaab is Africa’s most prolific creator of terrorist online content. The group is responsible for as much as 25% of all terrorist content currently available on the internet, according to Tech Against Terrorism, an independent, online organization launched by the United Nations in 2016.
Further complicating matters, content that may be considered terroristic in one country may be permitted by another country, creating a regulatory tangle for social media companies as they try to enforce community standards. Without a firm definition of terrorist online content, nonterrorist content could be punished and legitimate expressions criminalized, Mwale wrote.
The result, according to Tech Against Terrorism Executive Director Adam Hadley, has been an explosion of terrorist-related content across the internet with few attempts to remove it.
“We regularly find unedited material produced by terrorist organizations shared on major platforms, where historically, such content was at least obfuscated to evade detection mechanisms,” Hadley said in a speech to the Internet Governance Forum in 2024. “Networks of extremist-aligned actors operate openly on major social media platforms, often with minimal intervention.”
The solution, according to Mwale and other researchers, is to create a standard definition of terrorist online content that can resolve the confusion and smooth social media functions across borders.
In her analysis, Mwale recommended defining terrorist online content as any material that:
- Depicts terrorist acts and how to conduct them.
- Shares the ideologies of a terrorist group.
- Incites, supports or solicits a person to commit a terrorist act.
Mwale’s definition would include exemptions for journalists, educators, artists and researchers.
As an example of the difficulty of regulating terrorist online content, consider Africa’s three most online countries — Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. All three have laws that criminalize terrorist activities, including the possession or distribution of materials designed to incite violence. However, none of the laws spells out what terrorist online content looks like, Mwale notes. That lack of specifics makes internet companies reluctant to act while giving governments broad latitude to determine for themselves what constitutes terrorist online content — a situation that invites violations of human rights, according to experts.
While governments grapple with defining terrorist online content, terrorist groups are using generative artificial intelligence to create more content. In Nigeria, Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have deployed AI to edit videos, produce fake news broadcasts, impersonate government officials, and to evade content moderators, according to Mwale.
Many governments are poorly equipped to counter AI-created terrorist content, Mwale wrote recently for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. However, the same AI technology that terrorist groups are using could be turned against them to detect and shut down extremist content. Hadley estimates that his group finds only 1% of the terrorist content that is available online. Employing AI could improve both the capacity and accuracy for detecting terrorist online content, he said.
Ultimately, reining in terrorist content online will require African countries to produce a common definition of prohibited content while protecting free expression. Regional economic groups could provide the foundation for a united front against terrorists, as could the African Union, observers note.
“The fight against online terrorism is one that no single organization can win alone,” Hadley said. “The question before us isn’t whether we can completely stop terrorists from using the internet — it’s what we can achieve together.”