As AI-generated deepfakes and propaganda flood social media, a continent divided by faith finds itself on the front lines of a new information war.
On the morning of March 1, 2026, millions of Africans woke up to their phones buzzing with the same videos. A fireball swallowing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Iranian ballistic missiles slamming into the heart of Tel Aviv. A satellite image showing a US naval base in Qatar reduced to smouldering rubble. The images were stunning, vivid, and almost entirely false. Every single one had been fabricated using artificial intelligence.According to BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh, the U.S.-Iran war is possibly the first war in which misinformation using AI has been used more than any other means. It is a “new era” in AI-generated content during breaking news.And even though Africa is an ocean away from the actual theatre of war, with its 1.4 billion people increasingly connected via smartphone and social media, but with deep religious fault lines and fragile media literacy infrastructure, it has found itself neck deep in the information war as much as the actual combatants.
The Machines of Manufactured Reality
When the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, the bombs were not the only weapons deployed. Within hours, a parallel war had erupted online — one powered by generative AI tools that any teenager with a smartphone could access. Platforms like OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, Chinese app Seedance, and X’s built-in Grok became instruments of mass deception.Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at Queensland University of Technology, has tracked the consequences with alarm. “What used to require professional video production can now be done in minutes with AI tools,” he noted. “The barrier to creating convincing synthetic conflict footage has essentially collapsed.” The scale of the disinformation has drawn hundreds of millions of views globally, with AI-generated videos and fabricated satellite imagery driving false narratives from both sides of the conflict.Iran’s state-aligned media led with fabricated victories. The Tehran Times posted an AI-doctored satellite image purporting to show catastrophic damage at a US base in Qatar — an image later identified as generated by Google’s own AI tools, a fact exposed in part because three parked vehicles appeared in identical positions in both the real and doctored images, despite supposedly being captured a year apart. Iranian outlets falsely claimed that 650 US troops had been killed or wounded in the first two days of combat. US Central Command reported six deaths.The Israeli and US sides were not innocent. Political scientist Steven Feldstein, author of The Rise of Digital Repression, observed that both President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used images and messaging specifically designed to call on Iranian citizens to revolt against their own government. “The US is relying on information transmission as a means to mobilize change on the ground in Iran,” Feldstein said. Meanwhile, NewsGuard, the news-rating organisation, found 18 war-related claims by Iranian sources to be false within just the first days of fighting.Crucially, even AI chatbots designed to help users find the truth became part of the problem. When users on X turned to Grok — the platform’s own AI assistant — to verify whether a viral AI-generated video of missiles striking Tel Aviv was real, Grok repeatedly confirmed the fake as genuine.
Africa in the Crosshairs
Economically, the US-Israel war with Iran comes at a difficult time for many African economies, as a weaker dollar and lower interest rates had hitherto given some breathing space to many highly indebted countries. Nicholas Fischer, reporter at German paper Deutsche Welle, “The war is disrupting global trade, diverting ships from the Suez Canal to the longer route around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, which increases shipping costs and drives up prices for consumers.” In Nigeria, for example, petrol prices have risen by 40-50% this week, according to local media. Kenyan political analysts warn of economic consequences for those employed abroad, such as the more than 400,000 nationals of their country working in the Gulf states.With Africa’s level of interest in the war, and it being a continent where, as Timothy Graham, a digital media specialist at Queensland University of Technology. “monetisation driven by engagement and the distribution of accurate information are fundamentally at odds,” the continent is ripe for exploitation. Unfortunately, the AI revolution has dramatically lowered the cost of exploiting it. What once required a state-level disinformation operation can now be accomplished by a teenager with a laptop and a free AI video generator.There is another dimension to the information war that is concerning for Africa. When X rolled out a location-tracking feature for accounts in late 2025, the findings were startling: a significant proportion of accounts operating as “American right-wing influencers” were actually based in Africa, Bangladesh, Russia, and Ukraine. These were not organic commentators — they were disinformation operatives monetising outrage and geopolitical conflict for engagement-driven revenue.X’s Creator Revenue Sharing programme — which pays eligible accounts based on post impressions — has effectively turned the platform into what Graham calls “the ultimate misinformation enterprise.” Accounts need only five million organic impressions over three months to qualify, and viral AI-generated war footage routinely clears that threshold in hours. For users in lower-income African countries, where a viral post can generate income equivalent to weeks of formal wages, the economic incentive to share and create disinformation is potent.The stakes extend beyond individual profit. Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has documented how conflict-related misinformation exploits moments of urgent uncertainty. “Misinformation can gain a lot of traction when people have questions they need urgent answers to,” he has observed, noting the same dynamic played out during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The US-Iran war has replicated and amplified every one of those patterns.
The God Divide: Faith as a Vector for Disinformation
But as much as political issues are an entry point for the disinformation army, what makes Africa uniquely vulnerable is not merely its digital infrastructure or economic inequality, it is the religious geography of the continent. Africa is almost evenly split between Christianity and Islam, with approximately 600 million adherents of each faith. Nigeria alone, the continent’s most populous nation, is roughly divided along a Christian south and a Muslim north. The same pattern holds across the Sahel, East Africa, and swaths of Central Africa.The US-Iran conflict has been deliberately framed in religious terms by political leaders on all sides, and that framing has consequences that reach directly into African communities. Senior Trump administration officials invoked Christian nationalist language to justify the war. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described Iran as driven by “prophetic Islamic delusions.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, referring to Iran, stated that “we’re the Great Satan in their analogy and their misguided religion.” Christian Zionist televangelist John Hagee was widely circulated on social media, preaching that God would “crush” the “adversaries of Israel,” referencing “groups of Islamics” as existential enemies.This rhetoric does not stay in Washington. It floods WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and Facebook pages across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Ethiopia within hours. For many African Christians who follow evangelical and Pentecostal traditions closely aligned with American Christian Zionism, the framing of the war as a biblical confrontation between good and evil resonates deeply. Disinformation that casts Iran — and by extension, Islam — as an existential threat to Christianity finds fertile ground.Simultaneously, African Muslims face their own disinformation pipeline. Iranian state media and its affiliates push content designed to portray the US-Israeli offensive as a deliberate war on Islam — a crusade in modern dress. Pro-Palestinian solidarity movements, many of them legitimate, are being exploited as conduits for Iranian propaganda that blurs the lines between geopolitical conflict and religious persecution. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that from the first day of the war alone, over 25,300 Islamophobic posts appeared on X — content that would reach African Muslim communities through shared networks, deepening a sense of embattlement and victimhood.Moustafa Ayad has noted the alarming frequency with which conflict coverage triggers explicitly sectarian responses. Comments on AI-generated war videos routinely include sentiments like “I hope the Muslims kill the Jews” or calls for retaliation against entire communities. In African nations where Christian-Muslim relations are already fragile — as in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where deadly intercommunal violence is endemic — the injection of this globally amplified religious war narrative into local contexts carries the risk of real-world violence.
The Architecture of Susceptibility
What makes the African audience particularly susceptible is not credulity — it is a rational response to a broken information environment. Formal news institutions across the continent are under-resourced, often state-influenced, and rarely trusted. Social media fills the vacuum. Yet as Feldstein warns, the growing public awareness of AI deepfakes has paradoxically made things worse, not better: people increasingly dismiss real footage as fake when it contradicts their worldview, while accepting fakes that confirm it. “It’s now to a point where nothing that comes in beyond your own pre-existing narrative is accepted as something truthful,” he says.Religious identity becomes the pre-existing narrative. An African Christian who has been taught from the pulpit that Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that Islam is a civilizational threat will process war footage through that lens. An African Muslim who has watched Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran being subjected to Western and Israeli military force will interpret the same footage as confirmation of a global war against Muslims. Both communities are then served algorithmically tailored content — real, manipulated, or entirely fabricated — that confirms what they already believe.
Between Truth and the Algorithm
African media organisations, civil society groups, and religious leaders face a daunting task. Fact-checking organisations like Africa Check and PesaCheck have issued rapid-response guides, but they are outpaced by the speed and volume of AI-generated content. Some African governments have threatened internet shutdowns in response to war-related unrest, a measure that punishes citizens and legitimate journalism alongside disinformation.
Experts argue that the most durable solution involves not just technical media literacy — teaching people to reverse-image-search, to check watermarks, to scrutinise sources — but also what might be called narrative literacy: helping communities recognise when a foreign conflict is being packaged to exploit their specific fears and identities. Both Muslim and Christian religious leaders in Africa have a critical role to play, either as amplifiers of disinformation or as trusted voices counselling caution and nuance.The US-Iran war may be fought in the skies over the Persian Gulf, but its information battlefield stretches from Lagos to Nairobi, from Dakar to Addis Ababa. In that battle, the weapons are pixels and algorithms, the casualties are trust and social cohesion, and the targeting system is faith itself. Africa did not choose this war. But without urgent, continent-wide investment in information resilience, it may be among its most enduring victims.
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