This article, authored by Fair Tech founder, Afef Abrougui, is part of a collection of essays titled "New Digital Dilemmas: Resisting Autocrats, Navigating Geopolitics, Confronting Platforms" by the Digital Democracy Network. Check out the rest of the collection on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.
It is common practice for political leaders in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to use online platforms to weaponize identity for political gain, particularly in times of crisis. Those fighting to gain or maintain political power often mobilize support by deploying identity-driven propaganda and conspiracy theories. This serves to distract publics from substantive issues and discredit critics and opposition challengers. Regrettably, social media platforms have taken few meaningful steps to curb harmful speech and protect users. Instead, companies have trotted out superficial partnerships that have led to minimal change.
Tunisia Exemplifies the Weaponization of Identity on Social Media
Events in Tunisia illustrate the polarizing effect of social media, as well as the adept manner in which politicians have weaponized identity narratives for political gain. Tunisia’s current political crisis began with President Kais Saied’s power grab in 2021. Originally elected in 2019, Saied faced “three interrelated crises” by 2021: the fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a deteriorating economy, and political paralysis and heightened polarization. In response, he dissolved the democratically elected parliament and orchestrated a process to change the country’s constitution,1 paving the way for an “ultra-presidential” system that expanded his powers and weakened legislative and judicial checks.
Meanwhile, Saied’s critics including judges, journalists, political opponents, and activists have been subjected by his supporters to waves of harassment and smear campaigns on social media, mainly Facebook. Dozens of human rights defenders, journalists, unionists, and Saied’s critics were detained and prosecuted. Saied intensified his crackdown on free speech and critical voices by enacting a repressive cyber-crime decree in 2022 that imposed prison sentences on those accused of propagating alleged fake news.
The economic crisis continued to worsen in 2023 as Saied failed to put in place basic measures to mitigate its impacts on the most vulnerable people. Rather than take substantive steps to address Tunisia’s economic woes, Saied reverted to scapegoating Black migrants from other African countries.
In February 2023, in a meeting with his national security council (later posted on social media by his office), he denounced undocumented African migrants, stating they were part of a conspiracy to change the demography of the local population. “The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations,” he said.
The statement came amid a wave of racist attacks, online and offline, and unprecedented anti-migrant sentiment against African migrants. The campaign was started and led by a little-known political party, the Tunisian Nationalist Party (TNP), whose leaders espoused racist tropes similar to those adopted by right-wing groups and politicians in Europe and elsewhere. The party’s leaders falsely maintained that African migrants were seeking to colonize Tunisia, kick Tunisians out of their country, and benefit from social aid that should go to the local population.
According to analysis by France24, TNP’s campaign and its false statements and videos on social media experienced a surge in popularity following Saied’s February 2023 statement. While the party launched its initial social media campaign against African migrants in September 2022 (mainly on Facebook and TikTok), its videos garnered significantly more views and reach following the statement.
On social media, misleading and false videos purportedly showing African migrants causing traffic chaos, committing acts of violence, or arriving in droves, including in armed vehicles, spread on social media, garnering tens of thousands of views. Racism, particularly against Black Tunisians and African migrants, is not new. However, this campaign was unprecedented in its reach. As a result, migrants faced evictions, detentions, racists attacks, and layoffs. Xenophobia and racism became so severe in Tunisia that in March 2023 Côte d’Ivoire and Mali had to urgently repatriate “frightened nationals who flocked to their embassies for help.”
A Tactic Not Unique to Tunisia
The weaponization of identity for political gains by Saied, his government, and his supporters came at a time when political, financial, socioeconomic crises, as well as a water emergency exacerbated by climate change, unfolded in the country. But wielding identity politics is not unique to Tunisia.
Across the MENA region, moments of crisis have precipitated rises in hate speech and sectarianism, with those fighting to gain or maintain political power and their supporters deploying identity-driven propaganda and conspiracy theories to distract the public from substantive issues and discredit critics who challenge their rule. Such tactics have peaked during events perceived to be threats to the status quo, such as protests, popular uprisings, and elections.
In Lebanon, where sectarianism is institutionalized and enshrined in the constitution, nonstate actors and political groups do not hesitate to deploy sectarian-based attacks and hateful campaigns against their opponents and critics, including on social media. Lebanese politicians use nationalist and hateful discourses against Syrian and Palestinian refugees, scapegoating them for a worsening economic situation. For example, calls by the United Nations in 2022 for Lebanon to halt the forced repatriation of Syrian refugees were met with hateful campaigns and calls for violence. In July of that year, social media users spread xenophobic messages and disinformation about refugees under a Twitter hashtag, “#ارضنا_مش_للنازح_السوري” (“our land is not for the displaced Syrian”).
Similarly in Algeria, during the Hirak uprising—a series of popular protests that erupted in February 2019 in opposition to former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s intent to run for a fifth term in office—racist attacks and racial slurs against those from the Kabylia region intensified. Online trolls used the “zouave” slur to attack Kabyles2; associate them with France, Algeria’s former colonial power; and accuse them of being separatists. The aim by Arab nationalists was to weaken the protests by creating a narrative that the Hirak movement was a Franco-Amazigh conspiracy.
Social Media Platforms’ Lack of Meaningful Actions
This year, I led research for the Samir Kassir Foundation in Lebanon on hate speech in the country and the shortcomings of social media platforms’ responses. The findings of the research, published in July 2023, were disappointing but not surprising. Of the four platforms that we examined—Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube—none conducted human rights impact assessments in Lebanon (or elsewhere in the MENA region) to identify how their policy enforcement, or lack thereof, affected users’ human rights, including their right to nondiscrimination.
In light of big tech companies’ mass layoffs of content moderators (along with Twitter’s complete dismantling of its trust and safety apparatus), the future looks bleak. Civil society groups and human rights defenders in the MENA region have frequently called on tech companies to take responsibility for digital rights and ensure user safety and protection from hateful speech. The region represents a large market for social media, and adoption will continue to grow as internet penetration spreads. Platforms owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) are already widely used. Egypt is one of Facebook’s biggest markets, with more than 40 million active users. Meanwhile, Instagram registered 172.4 million users in the region, as of April 2023.
Yet, these companies have taken almost no meaningful actions to address harmful speech and safety concerns. When they have taken steps, they have mostly been superficial. For example, many of the platforms have set up partnerships with civil society groups to flag harmful content to be taken down. (YouTube calls them “priority flaggers,” TikTok calls them “safety partners,” and Meta calls them “trusted partners.”) But the outcomes are underwhelming, and the required time investment by civil society is significant. A recent report by Internews on Meta’s trusted partner program found that partners “often wait weeks or months for responses to their reports, even on issues relating to imminent harm” and that participation in the program increased their workload. Human rights defenders and digital rights groups in the MENA region are increasingly frustrated; activists describe these partnerships as “customer service support” for the platforms and “free labor.”
Challenging the Status Quo
The current dynamic where platforms set the rules of engagement, consult with civil society, and purport to listen to their concerns but fail to implement any real changes in how they do business needs to be challenged. How can that be achieved?
Civil society and human rights advocates need to explore legal options to force tech companies to respect and protect human rights, such as through strategic litigation in jurisdictions with more robust human rights protections. Perhaps there is something to be learned from litigation occurring in other regions. For instance, in 2021, Rohingya refugees sued Meta in the United States and the United Kingdom, alleging that the company’s algorithm amplified hate speech against the Rohingya during a genocidal campaign conducted by the Myanmar military starting in 2017. In December 2022, two Ethiopian citizens filed suit against Meta, alleging that the company promoted hate speech on the platform that contributed to the country’s deadly conflict in the Tigray region.
Funding and prioritizing pre-litigation research to explore opportunities for strategic lawsuits against tech companies that display irresponsible conduct is an essential first step. Civil society members, journalists, human rights defenders, and academics should also explore more multidisciplinary approaches and work with developers and the technical community to investigate the effects of platform technologies and algorithms in the MENA region. Gaining a better understanding about how algorithmic systems rank, recommend, and curate content in languages and dialects spoken in the region is not well understood. Hard data that documents harms stemming from tech companies’ business models can later be used through strategic litigation and media coverage to hold tech firms accountable and pressure them to take more meaningful measures.
Notes
1 The new constitution was adopted in July 2022, with a landslide majority (94 percent of voters) approving it. The referendum, however, was marked by a low turnout (30 percent of registered voters participated), as opposition groups called for a boycott and political apathy remained widespread among citizens concerned by a deteriorating economy.
2 According to Algerian researchers, the word “zouave” was first used to refer to a group of Algerian men from Kabylia who were hired by France in 1830 during its occupation of Algeria to be part of a light infantry unit of the French army. The term is now used as a racial slur against Kabyles.