Authoritarian governments are investing heavily in international news operations as Western countries scale back their own. China and Russia are spending hundreds of millions or possibly billions on disinformation and state-backed media, according to Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC, who in May 2025 called for increased funding to double the reach of the BBC's World Service.
Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, increased its Africa bureaus from a "handful" two decades ago to 37 by 2024, according to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies. The China Africa Press Centre flies African reporters to Chinese media outlets for ten-month assignments. StarTimes, a Chinese firm, is the second-largest digital-TV service in Africa.
Chinese state media are especially dominant on Facebook. CGTN, China's state-run television network, is the most-followed news organisation on Facebook, with 125m followers—just ahead of Shakira. The five most-followed news organisations on Facebook are all Chinese, disseminating news in English, despite the fact that Facebook is banned in China itself. The outlets appear to have bought much of their reach through Facebook advertising. A study in the Harvard Misinformation Review examined nearly 1,000 Facebook ads bought by Chinese state media in 2018-20, which were seen 655m times, mainly outside the rich world. Countries exposed to more of these ads produced more positive coverage of China.
Xinhua has an agreement with Kenya's Nation Media Group, giving it access to that firm's eight radio and television stations, 28m social-media followers and 90,000 daily-newspaper readers in four African countries.
China's state media have cultivated personal brands on Western platforms to reach elite audiences—diplomats, scholars and journalists—more effectively than official outlets can. The Economist identified over a dozen writers on Substack employed by China's state media, with more than 50,000 cumulative subscribers. Xinhua currently operates about 50 so-called "media studios"—outfits run by individuals or small teams that obscure their state-media credentials—and an estimated 1,000 or more exist across the country, aimed at domestic and foreign audiences. Internally these studios are known as "light cavalry", free from government bureaucracy but not its editorial control. A Xinhua official, Du Jian, has written that newsletters enable a long-term strategy to "influence readers' thoughts drop-by-drop" and build a "benign mutual relationship" with Western elites. Some writers disclose their government ties and insist they are independent; others do not prominently disclose them. According to a report in Chinese Journalist, a state-media trade magazine, at least one prominent Substack newsletter was "incubated within Xinhua's External Affairs Department".
RT, Russia's state-controlled news network, launched an advertising campaign in 2023-24 in countries including Mexico, India, Serbia and Tunisia. An RT ad on the front page of the Times of India asked: "Why won't Britain return the Koh-i-Noor diamond?" In 2024 RT opened the RT Academy, which trains journalists in Africa, South-East Asia and China. Sputnik, another state-run news organisation, launched an Africa service. RT and Sputnik share producers, camera crew and office space with Venezuela's Telesur and Iran's HispanTV in Latin America.
RT reportedly has contracts with more than 30 African TV stations to broadcast its content. African Initiative, a press agency in Bamako, Mali, which trained 60 journalists in 2024, was revealed by Forbidden Stories to be run by Russian intelligence.
Russia increasingly practises "narrative laundering"—co-opting local outlets and influencers rather than distributing content under its own brand. Romania's 2024 presidential election was cancelled after security agencies uncovered a Russia-led influence operation on TikTok.
TRT, Turkey's state-run news network, launched an Africa service in 2023 and opened a Somali-language branch in March 2025. It has been hiring former BBC staff.
In March 2025 President Donald Trump pulled funding for Voice of America and its sister networks and dismantled USAID, which had funded thousands of journalists around the world. Public broadcasters' budgets have been trimmed in Australia, Canada and France. Meta announced in January 2025 that it would start to replace its professional fact-checking network—probably the world's largest—with volunteers.
Independent fact-checkers such as Full Fact, Africa Check and AFP have developed triaging systems to sort dangerous misinformation from everyday nonsense, since a thorough fact-check takes five to six hours per claim.
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