On November 7, 2025, twenty-year-old Malian TikToker Mariam Cissé was publicly executed by the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen or JNIM—al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate. The jihadists shot Cissé in front of a crowd for sharing pro-army videos with her 100,000 followers, and warned that a similar fate awaited other supporters of the military junta.
Her killing is one of thousands of deaths in a war running since 2012, when Tuareg separatists rebelled for an independent northern state, al-Qaeda-linked groups seized the major northern cities and imposed Islamic law, and UN peacekeepers and French troops were drawn into stabilization and counter-terror operations. Coups in 2020 and 2021 brought Colonel Assimi Goïta to power; he expelled French forces and UN peacekeepers, and hired Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group. In April 2026, JNIM and a group of Tuareg separatists mounted the largest offensive of the war, killing the defense minister and blockading the capital city of Bamako.
Mali’s information space is now dominated by “videomen”: young, mostly male smartphone broadcasters livestreaming across online platforms, often in Bamanankan—Mali’s most widely spoken language. Their marathon livestreams and commentary interviews on the war and the junta’s enemies reach hundreds of thousands of viewers, sometimes millions. Gandhi Malien is the most prominent, with more than 1.8 million followers.
In the West, Mali’s videomen are often dismissed exclusively as Russian assets. However, they emerged in the mid-2010s primarily as a domestic political phenomenon—with Malian politicians across the spectrum bankrolling and protecting stables of these broadcasters in exchange for editorial influence. Gandhi Malien and Kati24, for instance, cast the junta’s critics as traitors—army setbacks are blamed on betrayal by the old political elite—and France as the enemy.
These online broadcasters showed their political weight during widespread protests in June 2020, sparked when the Constitutional Court overturned thirty-one legislative results in President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta’s favor. The movement’s spokesman, Choguel Maïga—later the junta’s prime minister—held his press conferences in front of videomen, who streamed its positions live.
Made in Mali, rented by Russia
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies attributed to Russia eighty of the 189 disinformation campaigns documented in the continent by March 2024. And while Russia neither created nor wholly controls Mali’s livestreamers, it works through this market.
In April 2022, days after France handed its Gossi base to the Malian army, French drone footage showed Wagner operatives burying corpses in shallow graves near the site. A fake account on X, posting as a Malian veteran, released video of the bodies and blamed French troops. France published its surveillance imagery; the Malian government accused France of espionage and subversion, rejecting the French account and opening its own investigation.
Russia’s ‘African Initiative’—built after former Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 death to take over the group’s propaganda operations—trains Malian influencers in content production and pro-Russian editorial framing, even offering jobs to some graduates. In May 2024 a Malian delegation, including Mamadou Sidibé of Gandhi Malien, traveled to Moscow and the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The channel promoted a video on “the exploits of the Russian army” in the occupied city.
Fighting the wrong medium
Western support in Mali has followed the legacy media-assistance model: journalist training, newsroom grants, fact-checking and media literacy, of the kind the US Agency for International Development (USAID) ran in more than thirty countries until the Trump administration dismantled USAID and terminated its media portfolio in January 2025.
Attempts to promote ‘counter-narratives’ in the Sahel have failed. France ran a military-linked network of fake accounts in the region, some posing as fact-checkers to counter Russian messaging; when exposed, the operation damaged French credibility. This form of covert strategic communications is largely ineffective and routinely uncovered, eroding the legitimacy of its sponsor: A Pentagon operation that used fake Filipino accounts to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine during the pandemic provoked a similar backlash. Research on responses to state-backed narratives finds that audiences disengage from content they perceive as externally directed. Manufactured, foreign-sponsored narratives will never connect with audiences as authentically as independent local voices.
Yet this model was built for a broadcast era. News consumption is moving to short vertical videos online and to individual creators rather than media brands. Russia’s newer spending targets the production skills needed to drive engagement in this new media landscape. In the online classes it offers, the Bamako-based Russian School of Journalism teaches students headline writing—for instance, “Macron, get out”—and fact-checking as a technique for discrediting opponents by flagging their Western funding.
Fund skills and reward engagement, not counter-narratives
Factual content can compete in the digital era. Even the videomen do not consistently adapt their marathon-streaming content into short vertical video for Mali’s TikTok generation. Hugo Travers, a twenty-nine-year-old French YouTuber, built HugoDécrypte—daily news roundups and interviews to camera—into a commercially funded operation reaching nearly a quarter of French people younger than thirty-five years old weekly, more than the legacy publications Le Monde, Libération, and Le Figaro combined.
However, the major digital platforms confine their creator payment programs to wealthier markets, and Malians are shut out. YouTube’s Partner Program is unavailable to creators based in Mali, while TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program does not run in any African country.
Until platform monetization expands, and digital advertising markets mature, media-focused grant-making should experiment with directly funding content creators in the region to make factual, short-form video that is unashamedly designed to “go viral.” The International Fund for Public Interest Media has issued seventy-eight grants worth $23 million across twenty-six countries, and this year committed around half a million dollars to independent media in Francophone West Africa.
A fund administrator could pay twenty Malian content creators weekly—a guaranteed living wage for the first year, giving them time to build an audience. Subsequent payments could be weighted toward posting frequency and audience engagement, within the production standards the program would teach—from hooks and pacing to the generative artificial intelligence tools that let one person post daily. The costs are modest: a few hundred thousand dollars at most.
In today’s information ecosystem these creators perform a public service comparable to traditional journalism and warrant similar support. Selection should favor breadth over reach—bringing new voices into the conversation, drawing creators from across Mali’s regions and communities, and a spread of ages and backgrounds.
A competitive application would allow candidates to set out their ideas and their commitment to accuracy. Program staff would review published output, and any creator found spreading disinformation or unverified rumors would lose funding immediately. The fund would claim no editorial control over subjects or opinions. Over time, this could be formalized the way the International Fact-Checking Network certifies fact-checkers, through a shared charter of accuracy that creators sign, giving those who keep to it a recognized mark of credibility.
Afrobarometer’s latest surveys across thirty-eight African countries find social media within nine percentage points of overtaking radio as the continent’s primary news medium; the gap was fifty points a decade ago. Across the forty-eight markets the Reuters Institute surveys, the share of people getting news through social video rose from 52 percent in 2020 to 65 percent in 2025.
Unless those who produce factual and engaging short-form video content are made competitive through funding and skilling, the videomen and their domestic and foreign patrons will continue to dominate the fast-expanding playing field for audience engagement—and the information ecosystem in the Sahel.
Tom Bonsundy-O’Bryan is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and professor of practice in technology and global affairs at IE University, Madrid. He previously spent six years at Meta working on policy across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and worked overseas for the UN and UK governments as a diplomat.
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Image: Microphones of media organisations and journalists sit on a table before a press conference at the Maison de la Presse building in Bamako, Mali, on May 11, 2026. Photo via REUTERS/Stringer.