Rival political networks used deceptive online campaigns and AI-generated content to shape public perceptions during elections.
As South Africans vote for local governments today, an upcoming report on Uganda's January 2026 election sheds light on Africa's evolving online influence landscape. It reveals the tactics used to shape what information the public received online and offers warnings for election monitors elsewhere.
Uganda has the world's second-youngest population, with three-quarters of citizens under 35. Slightly less than half of Ugandans own a smartphone.
The study, commissioned by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, drew on data, open-source investigations and Uganda-based field research. Mapping the networks (online communities) used to create and spread content, it showed that the election was essentially a two-sided 'digital duel'.
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Despite a skewed playing field, with tight state control of information and an internet shutdown, the Bobi Wine-led opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) maintained its online presence through coordinated reposting and diaspora mobilisation. Wine remains in exile following death threats after the polls.
Researchers found organised influence campaigns at national and regional levels. Intense posting by both ideological and paid influencers sought to unify Yoweri Museveni's factionalised National Resistance Movement (NRM), which has held power since 1986.
Both NRM and the NUP used inauthentic buzzer accounts to amplify their narratives. Buzzers are human-operated fake profiles - 'sock puppets' - whose controllers are often paid to promote a viewpoint. Unlike traditional advertising, these covert measures do not require disclosure of activities or payments associated with the accounts. Similar buzzer activity was observed in South Africa's 2024 general election.
Uganda's 2026 tactics were seemingly built on 2021 election experiences, when operatives at the Government Citizen Interaction Centre, a citizen liaison portal reporting to State House, were paid to create fake accounts to try to match the NUP's youth vote.
One employee said he created 40-plus sock puppet accounts that favoured NRM narratives. With the centre now led by Marcella Karekye, a friend of Museveni's daughter, the tactics have evolved beyond the agency and spread into other domains.
Data and testimonies show that state-aligned influencers captured a popular entertainment YouTube channel to boost the NRM's online presence and reposition it as a party for youth. Hashtags used included #ProtectingTheGains - one of the ruling party's most prominent online slogans.
The operation streamed pro-government rallies and reformatted footage into election explainers. It passed the content to influencers on the ruling party's payroll as supposedly neutral reportage spread across multiple social media and messaging platforms.
Some content, including artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes and videos taken out of context, was amplified by a network of social media influencers. This network comprised at least nine nodes that streamed and repackaged material in what was branded 'The Longest Online Rally'. A separate campaign, Jazz with Jajja, invited ordinary Ugandans to put questions to Museveni, packing its audience with paid influencers posing as ordinary citizens.
Influence and narrative domination are the mainstay of politics, but observers say the largely covert nature of online influence campaigns contravenes the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity.
There was also limited but persistent foreign influence activity, notably from Russia-aligned and Make America Great Again (MAGA)-aligned accounts. Both appear to have used the election to 'launder' content on the United States (US)-Iran, Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine conflicts by embedding narratives in unrelated local conversations.
Some of these actors or their proxies hijacked election hashtags and used AI-generated imagery to push neo-colonial narratives and anti-Western sentiment. False stories of African service personnel being drafted to fight the US' war with Iran, for example, appeared after the election, alongside sport, youth empowerment and Pan-Africanism content.
This type of war propaganda reflects a growing global use of AI-doctored material, in extreme cases involving the creation of synthetic soldiers. The Uganda campaign appeared to mirror content seen in other contexts, where Africans were allegedly drafted into the Russia-Ukraine war.
Some of this is accurate (Kenyans and South Africans have been deceptively recruited and trafficked), but some used unrelated images of deceased soldiers. There has been no documented recruitment of Africans to fight against Iran, but plausible deniability and tapping into human emotions make disinformation campaigns hard to counter.
The apparent involvement of foreign influencers seemed to play a marginal role and did not indicate a concerted campaign to swing the Ugandan election.
Attacks on legacy media, a pillar of democracy, also featured. A cyberattack on a national media platform days before polling followed a long-running government campaign that included banning the Nation Media Group's flagship outlets from covering election rallies and parliamentary proceedings. There has been no attribution for the cyber intrusion, which managers said took down email access and some archive functionality, but experts consider these classic hybrid tactics.
The hostility continued months after voting. Museveni's son General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, armed forces head and leader of the NRM faction, the Patriotic League of Uganda, temporarily shut down Nation Media Group for 'critical reporting'. This signals a trend towards undermining professional journalism, whose traditional oversight role is an important mechanism to hold power to account.
Days before January's election, a week-long internet shutdown, ostensibly for national security, limited media and civil society's oversight of the polling process. Yet certain media houses enjoyed privileged access - notably NBS TV, owned by Next Media, which is run by former presidential adviser Kin Kariisa. NBS TV managers agreed for their reporters to be subject to state surveillance in exchange for 'whitelisting'.
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The tactics in Uganda, which tap into a lucrative influence-for-hire market, build on those seen in other settings. But the capture of YouTube entertainment platforms - a new development - and other deceptive amplification techniques highlight the limitations of current controls.
YouTube's community guidelines suggest that such tactics may be a violation, but if the capture of channels is done with owners' consent, this could be contested. The report signals the need for deeper engagement with tech platforms to understand how they may be exploited for political gain and the mechanisms by which narratives are inauthentically spread.
The internet may have helped political organisation and debate - but deceptive use risks turning quality information into a free-for-all.
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Karen Allen, ISS Consultant, independent researcher and former BBC foreign correspondent
