Industrialized Disinformation: Tunisia’s Growing Digital Threat

In the lead-up to Tunisia’s October 2024 presidential elections—the first since the July 2021 coup d’état—a surge of suspicious political content has flooded social media platforms. Both pro- and anti-regime messages have proliferated, ranging from advertisements criticizing election officials to suspicious foreign-sounding profiles engaging with government content.

This digital battleground has particular significance in Tunisia, where Facebook remains the dominant social platform and a critical space for political discourse. What was once a cottage industry of local disinformation has transformed into a sophisticated international operation run by specialized firms. The industrialization of these campaigns raises profound questions about Tunisia’s democratic future.

Two anonymous Tunisian researchers have documented this troubling evolution, tracing how manipulation tactics have grown increasingly sophisticated since 2019. Their investigation reveals that disinformation narratives frequently circulate between countries in the region, creating what locals call “electronic flies”—coordinated campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion.

“The sector has gone from being a local, cottage industry to a veritable industry run by specialized companies operating on an international scale,” the researchers note. “This industrialization of disinformation goes hand in hand with a phenomenon of opinion manipulation.”

The 2019 presidential election served as Tunisia’s first major warning sign. The Oxford Internet Institute documented widespread manipulation tactics, including unaffiliated Facebook pages disseminating false surveys and deliberately misleading content. The Digital Forensic Research Lab uncovered that an Israeli company, Archimedes Group, had created disinformation campaigns benefiting presidential candidate Nabil Karoui. These pages often masqueraded as neutral journalistic channels while attacking opponents.

The political upheaval of July 25, 2021, when President Kais Saied suspended parliament, marked another digital turning point. Social media mobilization preceded the event, with some Facebook groups amassing over 700,000 subscribers. While some of this activity reflected genuine popular sentiment, researcher Marc Owen Jones found evidence that accounts linked to the United Arab Emirates-Egypt-Saudi Arabia axis were amplifying anti-Ennahdha messages through bots, influencers, and coordinated hashtags.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Tunisia’s digital manipulation ecosystem took a darker turn in recent years with targeted hate campaigns against sub-Saharan African migrants. Beginning in 2021 with a fringe nationalist party, these efforts culminated in President Saied’s February 2023 speech claiming a “criminal plan to change the demographic landscape” through immigration.

In the months leading up to this speech, Tunisian social media platforms were inundated with xenophobic content spreading false rumors about migrants. By spring 2023, over 50 anti-migrant Facebook groups and pages had emerged, with subscribers from across the Maghreb region.

This phenomenon extends beyond Tunisia. Morocco has seen ultranationalist movements spreading since 2019, while similar groups appeared in Egypt in 2022. These movements share common characteristics: nostalgia for a glorious past, desire for a strong state marked by xenophobia, opposition to NGOs defending minorities, and appropriation of far-right memes from the American alt-right.

Content moderation remains woefully inadequate. An internal Facebook survey in 2020 revealed that in the Middle East and North Africa region, only 6% of hate content was detected on Instagram, compared to 40% on Facebook. Digital rights defender Rima Sghaier explains that many pages evade moderation through sophisticated techniques, including “posting ephemeral stories or quickly deleting hateful content before it’s moderated.”

Behind these campaigns lie “troll farms”—operations employing hundreds or thousands of people to run fake personal accounts. Researchers Marina Ayeb and Tiziano Bonini have documented how these workers, often based in Egypt and Iraq, manage dozens of profiles each, creating a mass effect that makes fringe opinions appear mainstream.

The implications for Tunisia’s fragile democracy are profound. While Decree-Law 54 ostensibly combats disinformation, critics note it has primarily been used to silence legitimate criticism rather than address industrialized manipulation.

“Companies such as Meta, X, and TikTok must be made to face up to their responsibilities in terms of content moderation,” the researchers argue. They call for greater investment in region-specific research, noting that Western-focused studies have limited relevance in Tunisia’s context.

The industrialization of online manipulation ultimately raises existential questions for democracy advocates across the Arab world: How should social movements engage with platforms where algorithms and far-right content dominate? Should they create alternative spaces or attempt to compete in an increasingly hostile digital environment?

As Tunisia approaches its critical October elections, these questions take on renewed urgency in a country whose democratic trajectory hangs in the balance.