On October 6, 2024, Tunisians held their third presidential election since the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime. Almost fourteen years on, however, the giddy optimism of the revolution seems lost amid a fog of decrees, arrests, and conspiracies, as President Qais Said has consolidated a dictatorship in all but name.

With 90% of the vote in his favor, Said’s landslide victory may well be the product of falsified ballots and systematic harassment of his political rivals. Nevertheless, some of his success may owe yet to the hateful nationalist rhetoric to which he has turned in recent years. Digital Action released a timely report on Tunisian social media (October 30, 2024), describing Tunisia’s authoritarian recidivism and the conspiracy theories that have underwritten it. In particular, the report identifies two narratives espoused by the Qais Said regime: that Tunisia is under threat of settler-colonialism, inundated by sub-Saharan African migrants; and that Tunisian civil society organizations opposing Said’s authoritarianism are in fact foreign agents funded and directed by Western powers.

We begin where the Digital Action report left off, delving deeper into Facebook to map out and quantify this network of hatred and disinformation. In what follows we develop and run a Facebook scraper to hoover up over 150,000 posts from January 1, 2024 to November 30, 2024, uncovering a network of hundreds of  pro-Said Facebook accounts that traffic in these conspiracy theories. We identify the most prominent malefactors in this network, and draw attention to some of their malicious content.

Tunis Today

The Digital Action report implicates several Facebook accounts, including a page named تونس اليوم (Tunis Today) which, as of the time of writing in January 2025, has over 69k followers.

Figure 1: Screenshot of Tunis Today’s Facebook page, taken in January 2025

We begin our investigation by scraping all 2,021 posts published by this account between January 1, 2024 and November 30, 2024. Many of these posts involved Tunis Today sharing content published by other Facebook entities. The act of sharing content typically implies endorsement, so we infer that these other Facebook entities were likely ones that Tunis Today views as ideologically aligned. Table 1 lists 10 of these entities that Tunis Today most frequently cited.

Table 1: Top ten Facebook entities cited by Tunis Today during the period Jan 1, 2024 - Nov 30, 2024.

Notably, several of the entities are named and organized around the concept of resisting “African colonialism”, one of two primary disinformation/hate narratives identified in the Digital Action report. In particular, the Facebook groups مواجهة الاستيطان الاجصي بصفاقس 2 and لا للإستيطان في تونس 🇹🇳, as well as the Facebook page مقاومة الإستعمار الإفريقي في تونس La , all seem to exist as online gathering spaces for Tunisians to vent and plot against this imagined threat.

Also appearing in this shortlist is the Facebook page of سفيان بن الصغير (Soufiene Bensghaier), the leader of the Tunisian National Party (TNP), a fringe figure in Tunisian politics whose caustic nationalist rhetoric was seized upon by Tunisian president Said Qais in a notorious February 2023 speech (see here for further context). The twin disinfo/hate narratives identified by the Digital Action report – that Tunisia is being invaded by African migrants, and that Tunisian civil society is infiltrated by Europeans – can both be traced back to Soufiene Bensghaier.

Table 1: Top ten Facebook entities cited by Tunis Today during the period Jan 1, 2024 - Nov 30, 2024.

Notably, several of the entities are named and organized around the concept of resisting “African colonialism”, one of two primary disinformation/hate narratives identified in the Digital Action report. In particular, the Facebook groups مواجهة الاستيطان الاجصي بصفاقس 2 and لا للإستيطان في تونس 🇹🇳, as well as the Facebook page مقاومة الإستعمار الإفريقي في تونس La , all seem to exist as online gathering spaces for Tunisians to vent and plot against this imagined threat.

Two-hop Network of Hate and Disinformation

By hand, we briefly inspected each of the top 100 entities cited by Tunis Today (each of the 10 entities listed in Table 1, and then the next 90 entities after that), which cumulatively accounted for 80% of Tunis Today’s shared content. Based on our inspection we decided which among them seemed to be focused on Tunisian politics. Then we scraped all of their posts between January 1, 2024 and November 30, 2024, and from those posts we identified the entities they most often cited, manually inspected them as before, and again scraped their posts. This is known as a ‘two-hop’ network spidering procedure, and it yielded the network map depicted in Figure 2.

Two-hop network map of disinformation and hate speech. Nodes (circles) represent distinct Facebook entities, while edges (lines between circles) indicate citation behavior on Facebook. Nodes that end up in the center are widely cited. Nodes that end up large are frequently cited. Color coding is determined by the Louvain community detection algorithm, and implies possible cliques within the broader Tunisian hate/disinfo community.

The network map depicted in Figure 2 consists of 3,612 distinct Facebook entities extracted from 147,962 scraped Facebook posts. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest Facebook dataset of Tunisian politics ever scraped in the public domain.

The reader should be cautioned that not all of the entities in the network map of Figure 2 necessarily spew hateful or disinformative content. To appear in the map, an entity merely had to be cited often by Tunis Today (one hop), or by those cited often by Tunis Today (two hops). For example, Successful Tunisia is a Facebook entity that simply highlights Tunisian success stories, but as such is often cited by the hate/disinfo network as part of their overall nationalist fervor. Likewise, news outlets such as Al Hadath Tunisia or Mosaique FM appear in this network not necessarily because they publish hateful or disinformative content, but simply because their news missives are often cited by Tunis Today and its entourage.

African colonization narrative

With those caveats in mind, however, our method of constructing this network guaranteed that hateful and disinformative entities would be overrepresented. To drill down into the harmful content itself, we inspected hundreds of posts by hand and concluded that AI tools would struggle to classify posts as hateful or disinformative based purely on their text content, since there was often an image, video, or embedded text, that supplied vital contextual information to which the AI tools would be blind. Instead, we realized that content pertaining to the African colonialism narrative and the civil society infiltration narrative could be identified with a simpler approach of keyword matching. Accordingly, we drew up two lists of keywords pertaining to each of these two narratives, and scanned all posts in our dataset for mention of any of these keywords. Figure 3 presents a time series chart of posts pertaining to the African colonization narrative over the course of 2024.

Figure 3: The number of posts published per day by the Tunisia network mentioning the ‘African colonization’ narrative.

Consistent with the Digital Action report, we find a substantial uptick in posts mentioning the African colonization narrative in May 2024, five months ahead of the elections. Of course, not all members of the network dwelt equally on this subject. Table 2 contains a list of the Facebook entities most frequently making reference to the African colonization narrative.

Table 2: Entities most frequently mentioning the African colonization narrative

Not surprisingly, Soufiene Ben Sghaier features here, as the alleged progenitor of the African colonization narrative, with 21.4% of his posts mentioning that theme. On the other hand, he is outmatched in his vitriol against African migrants by several Facebook pages dedicated to expelling them from Tunisia – most notably @humatalhima9, whom we mentioned earlier as a favorite of Tunis Today, and which enjoys substantial reach with over 46k followers. The next largest such page is تونس : تنسيقية توانسة ضد الأستيطان و التوطين, with 9.2k followers.

Stepping back from these extreme examples, however, Table 3 lists the members of the 2-hop network who score the highest eigenvector centrality, meaning they are the most central (widely cited) members of the network.

Table 3: Top network members by eigenvector centrality

Unsurprisingly, the member of the network with the highest eigenvector centrality is the Facebook page of the Tunisian president Qais Said himself. As we know already from the Digital Action report, the president has been the chief instigator of the African colonization conspiracy theory.

Media bias

What Table 3 reveals, however, is that there are a number of Tunisian news outlets central to this network. As a practical matter, the social media accounts of news outlets are difficult to scrape because they post a high volume of content. Moreover, upon manual review, we found that only a fraction of their content pertained to Tunisia, while many of their posts addressed the ongoing Gaza genocide, or the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Where posts dealt with Tunisia, the content was often related to sports or entertainment. 

To sift efficiently through this massive volume of content in search of conspiracy theorizing, we searched through content we had scraped from other (non-media) accounts in our dataset to find instances where those non-media accounts shared content posted by the media accounts in Table 3 while also mentioning the African colonization narrative. This search method helped us identify specific news broadcasts that implicate several of these media outlets, and we have included links to such broadcasts in the third column of Table 3. What we find consistently is that these media outlets give airtime to these conspiracy theories without pushing back or criticizing them, and in some cases (see the AttessiaTV link, for example) amplifying a sense of crisis or agitation without substantiation. In some cases this behavior is unsurprising – Radio Sfax, for example, is state-controlled, so it makes sense that it would parrot and propagate the narratives of the Tunisian president. On the other hand, Mosaïque FM enjoyed until only a few years ago a reputation for being more independent and critical, until indeed its director was arrested. Consistent with other reports on Tunisia, it would seem that such independent media outlets have gradually fallen under the sway of the state.

Sfax

At the heart of the network we find repeated references to Sfax, a coastal Tunisian city that seems to have been seized upon by this network of conspiracy theorists as an epicenter of this manufactured crisis. As a coastal town, it is presumably viewed as a port of exit for African migrants as they board boats destined for Europe. According to the conspiracy theory, European governments, desperate to stanch the flow of African migrants to Europe, work through Tunisian civil society organizations to dissuade and divert African migrants from Europe to settle instead in Tunisia, in places like Sfax.

In addition to the state-controlled Radio Sfax itself, the network draws attention to a personality, Zied Mallouli, Professor Emeritus in Sfax province, who has 43.9k followers and claims to be the founder of the #سيب_التروتوار (#SAYEB_ETROTTOIR) to “fight against the invasion of sidewalks by cafés and merchants”. Indeed, the Facebook group Sayeb-ETRottoir, which has over 260k followers, is administered by Mallouli via several accounts.

Figure 5: Zied Mallouli administrates and moderates an anti-African Facebook hate group of 260k+ members.

Tunisian Civil Society

According to the conspiracy theorists, Tunisian civil society organizations are implicated in the plot to facilitate the settler-colonization of Tunisia by sub-Saharan Africans. In particular, the theory alleges that European governments fund Tunisian CSOs to dissuade African migrants from making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe, and instead divert them to settle down in Tunisia illegally.

Figure 4 contains a screenshot of a network map posted by SentinelsCommunity, a member of the two-hop network and a seemingly defunct Facebook page that advances this conspiracy theory. The network map shows a constellation of European and North American aid agencies (circular icons in the map) and six Tunisian civil society organizations (named in red letters) that are their alleged recipients of funding.

Figure 4: A network map appearing in one of SentinelsCommunity’s posts, depicting alleged ties between Western aid agencies (circular icons) and Tunisian civil society organizations (named in red font).

Conclusion

In this investigation we unearthed a dense network of Tunisian Facebook pages, groups, and individual accounts, that collectively traffic hateful disinformation. At the heart of this network is the Facebook page of the Tunisian president, whose nationalist rhetoric for the past two years has cast Tunisian civil society and sub-Saharan African migrants as settler-colonial threat vectors. While questions remain as to whether Qais Said's successful reelection campaign of 2024 hinged on electoral fraud and repressive tactics, it seems clear at least from social media that his conspiracy theorizing has resonated with, and been amplified by, a substantial online community.