Samira El-Khalil
When public trust fragments, authority no longer needs to persuade everyone. It only needs to dominate the uncertainty.
Tunis, June 2026
North Africa is not simply facing a disinformation problem. That description is already too narrow for what is unfolding across the region. The deeper struggle concerns who is allowed to define reality when institutions no longer persuade, media systems do not share a common frame and citizens have learned to treat every official statement as potentially incomplete.
Rumors now move with the speed of breaking news and, in some cases, with greater authority. They influence demonstrations, migration debates, diplomatic reactions and perceptions of national security. They rarely arrive as complete inventions. More often, they attach themselves to familiar grievances such as unemployment, corruption, regional inequality, foreign interference or memories of colonial humiliation.
Libya offers the clearest example because political fragmentation has made uncertainty almost permanent. Competing governments, armed groups, foreign sponsors and rival media networks produce different versions of the same event, frequently at the same time. Citizens are left to decide what is true without knowing which institution still possesses enough legitimacy to verify it.
Recent hostility toward international organizations has shown how quickly claims about migration, resettlement and demographic threats can become politically useful. The factual content matters, but not always as much as the emotion activated by it. A rumor that confirms an existing fear can continue circulating after it has been disproved because its strength does not come exclusively from evidence. It comes from the anxiety it organizes.
The central issue is therefore not limited to whether a particular claim is true. It also involves who benefits from making that claim believable and which political actors gain authority when uncertainty expands. In fragmented systems, the capacity to impose an interpretation can become more important than the formal power to govern.
The pattern extends beyond Libya. Across Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, narratives move between Arabic, French, local dialects, English and Arabizi. They are translated, shortened, intensified and separated from their original sources. By the time a message reaches another audience, it may no longer resemble the statement from which it began, although its political purpose remains intact.
This linguistic mobility reflects the cultural complexity of North Africa, but it also makes manipulation difficult to trace. A message can sound nationalist in one language, religious in another and anti-colonial in a third. Its vocabulary changes according to the audience, while the emotion it seeks to produce remains remarkably stable.
The most effective disinformation does not need to invent public anger. It only needs to give that anger a recognizable direction. A citizen who distrusts inflation figures, employment data or government explanations may turn toward a conspiratorial account not because it is objectively stronger, but because it appears to acknowledge frustrations that official language leaves untouched.
Institutions often respond with technical explanations when citizens are asking moral questions. People want to know who is responsible, who is protected and who is benefiting from their insecurity. A correction may establish that a number, date or quotation is false, but it cannot repair the damaged relationship between a population and the authority asking to be believed.
Once that relationship deteriorates, official denials can be interpreted as further evidence of concealment. This is the point at which an information problem becomes a political one. The dispute is no longer about isolated facts. It concerns the legitimacy of the institutions that produce, verify and distribute them.
North African governments frequently describe disinformation as a threat to stability, and they are not wrong. False claims can provoke violence, target migrants, undermine humanitarian operations and intensify regional tensions. Yet the same governments often restrict journalism, delay public information or rely on opaque decision-making that encourages speculation.
When citizens know that important negotiations occur behind closed doors, unofficial explanations stop appearing irrational. When public institutions release information late, selectively or through language designed to avoid responsibility, rumor occupies the space left behind. Some claims are false, others are premature and others contain fragments of reality distorted by political use.
The distinction between them is rarely preserved once they begin circulating. Governments condemn digital manipulation while relying on coordinated messaging, friendly media outlets and selective leaks to defend their own position. Opposition groups denounce propaganda and, at the same time, distribute accusations that remain unverified because they serve a useful political narrative.
The result is not a clean confrontation between truth and falsehood. It is a crowded field of partial truths, strategic omissions and competing suspicions. In that environment, credibility does not necessarily belong to the actor with the strongest evidence. It often belongs to the actor whose explanation reaches the public first and fits most closely with an existing grievance.
Foreign powers understand this terrain. Russian influence operations do not always require audiences to admire Moscow. It may be sufficient to persuade them that no actor is trustworthy, that Western institutions are hypocritical and that democratic language conceals other forms of domination.
Once citizens believe every source is compromised, transparency loses much of its political value. Confusion becomes useful because it weakens the possibility of accountability. The objective is not necessarily to replace one version of reality with another, but to create enough competing versions that no institution can claim authority over the facts.
European governments have also weakened their credibility. Their policies toward North Africa often combine public language about human rights with private arrangements centered on migration control. Security structures accused of abuse may continue receiving funding, equipment or diplomatic support from governments that publicly defend democratic values.
These contradictions do not need to be invented by hostile networks. They already exist and can be repeated selectively. The gap between declared principles and practical decisions becomes material for narratives that portray every international commitment as strategic deception.
China follows a quieter model. Its influence is commonly linked to ports, telecommunications, roads, energy agreements and the language of noninterference. It offers predictability rather than moral instruction, which can appear attractive to governments tired of Western conditions or public criticism.
Infrastructure, however, is never only infrastructure. Digital systems, surveillance technologies and communication networks shape what states are able to observe, monitor and control. Information power can arrive inside a contract presented as purely economic, without immediately appearing as part of a political strategy.
This is why the crisis of truth is gradually becoming a crisis of sovereignty. A state may control ministries, borders and security forces while losing authority over the public meaning of events. It can preserve power in a legal or coercive sense and weaken in the interpretive one.
Citizens then begin to outsource reality to influencers, encrypted channels, foreign broadcasters, partisan pages and anonymous accounts. Not all of those sources are malicious. Some exist because formal institutions failed, while others are more responsive, more local or more willing to acknowledge what official narratives omit.
The fragmentation still carries consequences. Rumors can redirect crowds, turn migrants into symbols of invasion and transform humanitarian organizations into imagined instruments of foreign control. They can make structural economic failures appear to be the work of an invented enemy and prepare societies to accept emergency measures that would otherwise seem excessive.
The most dangerous stage may not be the moment when a population believes a specific lie. It may arrive when citizens stop believing that truth can be established at all. That exhaustion favors power because accountability requires at least some shared factual ground.
Without that ground, investigations become propaganda, evidence becomes performance and every contradiction can be dismissed as manipulation. Authoritarian systems do not always need to control every narrative. Sometimes they benefit from the existence of too many narratives competing at once.
North Africa’s information disorder is therefore no longer a secondary question of media hygiene. It has become part of the region’s political structure. Governments, militias, foreign states, technology platforms and digital entrepreneurs all compete to shape perception, even when their motives differ and their strategies appear unrelated.
The usual response is to call for media literacy, stronger fact-checking and better content moderation. These measures remain necessary, but they are insufficient when the institutions responsible for public information are themselves distrusted. A society cannot rebuild confidence through technical corrections alone if the underlying political behavior remains unchanged.
Governments must release information before rumor becomes the default explanation. Public officials must speak in language citizens recognize instead of relying on bureaucratic formulas designed to obscure responsibility. Independent journalism must be protected not only as a democratic principle, but as essential infrastructure for political stability.
Technology platforms must also understand the region they claim to moderate. Systems developed primarily for English or formal Arabic frequently fail to detect manipulation expressed through dialect, code-switching, irony or culturally specific references. A phrase that appears harmless to an automated system may communicate a clear threat or insinuation to a local audience.
Even perfect moderation would not resolve the deeper problem. Trust is not a technical setting and cannot be restored through software alone. It is a consequence of institutional behavior repeated over time.
A government that manipulates information today cannot credibly demand public confidence tomorrow. A foreign power that speaks of stability while supporting repression should not be surprised when its statements are treated with suspicion. A media organization that sacrifices verification for speed eventually becomes part of the disorder it claims to describe.
The republic of rumors does not emerge because people suddenly lose respect for truth. It develops when truth becomes delayed, selective, politicized or dangerous to speak. North Africa may not be moving toward a future without facts, because facts remain documented, archived and sometimes exposed with considerable courage.
The unresolved question is whether those facts still possess enough authority to shape political life.