Compilation image. Photo: MintPress News.
By Alan MacLeod – Jul 3, 2025
On Tuesday, July 1, 2025, African Stream published its final video, a defiant farewell message. With that, the once-thriving pan-African media outlet confirmed it was shutting down for good. Not because it broke the law. Not because it spread disinformation or incited violence. But because it told the wrong story, one that challenged U.S. power in Africa and resonated too deeply with Black audiences around the world. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused it of being a Kremlin front, Big Tech didn’t hesitate, and within hours, the platform was erased from nearly every major social media site.
In September, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the call and announced an all-out war against the organization, claiming, without evidence, that it was a Russian front group. “Russian state-funded media outlet RT secretly runs the online platform, African Stream, across a wide range of social media platforms,” he said, adding:
According to the outlet’s website, ‘African Stream is’ – and I quote ‘a pan-African digital media organization based exclusively on social media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans, both at home and abroad.’ In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.”
Within hours, big social media platforms jumped into action. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all deleted African Stream’s accounts, while Twitter demonetized the organization.
African Stream attempted to continue, but it finally ceased operations this week. MintPress News spoke with the company’s founder and CEO, Ahmed Kaballo, who told us that, with just one statement, Washington was able to destroy their entire operation, stating:
We are shutting down because the business has become untenable. After we got attacked by Antony Blinken, we really tried to continue, but without a platform on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and being demonetized on X, it just meant the ability to generate income became damn near impossible.”
The news has disappointed the Nairobi, Kenya-based outlet’s large and rapidly growing follower base. At the time of the coordinated operation against it, the account boasted almost one million followers on TikTok, almost 880,000 on Instagram, and almost half a million on YouTube, reaching 30-40 million people per month. Growing from nothing in 2022, it expanded rapidly, offering a pan-African perspective on global events, and worked to expose the role of imperialism on the continent.
African Stream cultivated a large and committed audience among African Americans, with celebrities, rappers, and NBA basketball stars regularly sharing their content. It was this combination of anti-imperialist messaging and influence with Black America that Kaballo believes triggered the State Department smears, explaining that:
We criticized the Republicans and the Democrats. We followed the pan-African tradition of Malcolm X, who said that there is no difference between the fox and the wolf, you get bitten either way. And because we had so much influence on the Black community in the U.S., we were seen to be a threat to the Democratic Party. That’s why we feel like it was a partisan attack.”
Blinken’s attack was not the first African Stream had received. Last June, NBC News claimed (without providing examples) that African Stream sought to undermine the 2024 elections by spreading disinformation. Then, in August, U.S. government-funded media outlet Voice of America wrote that Kaballo’s organization “distorts the U.S. military’s mission in Somalia,” insisting that the U.S. is bombing one of the continent’s poorest countries to “protect civilians.” Leaked documents also show that the British Foreign Office plotted to run a smear campaign against them.
Kaballo told MintPress that he expected the attacks. “It’s no real surprise,” he said. “The surprise was that big tech, with no evidence whatsoever, decided to take us down.”
However, given the extremely close ties between Silicon Valley and the U.S. national security state – something that MintPress has consistently reported on – Kaballo should perhaps have been more prepared for this outcome.
Google’s Director of Security and Public Trust, Ben Randa, for example, was formerly NATO’s Strategic Planning and Information Officer. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Senior Misinformation Policy Manager, Aaron Berman, the individual most responsible for determining the platform’s political direction, is a former high-ranking CIA agent. Like other platforms, TikTok has also hired dozens of former officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department to oversee its most sensitive internal affairs.
If Blinken genuinely wanted to unearth a government-sponsored influence operation, he would not have to look far. Earlier this year, a funding freeze at the U.S. government agency USAID exposed a global network of supposedly “independent” media outlets that Washington secretly bankrolled. The scale of this operation was vast: more than 6,200 journalists at nearly 1,000 organizations across five continents had their salaries secretly paid in whole or in part by the U.S. government.
While the outlooks of these media groups differed, they all shared one similarity: an unwavering commitment to promoting Washington’s interests.
The pause in funding was keenly felt in Ukraine. Oksana Romanyuk, the director of the country’s Institute for Mass Information, lamented that almost 90% of local media outlets were funded by USAID, including many with no other source of income.
In neighboring Belarus, a survey of 20 leading outlets found that 60% of their budgets came directly from Washington.
Following the freeze, anti-government Cuban media were plunged into an existential crisis. Miami-based CubaNet, for instance, published an editorial soliciting donations from its readers. “We are facing an unexpected challenge: the suspension of key funding that sustained part of our work,” they wrote; “If you value our work and believe in keeping the truth alive, we ask for your support.”
In 2024, CubaNet received around half a million dollars from USAID alone. U.S.-backed Iranian media, meanwhile, resorted to mass layoffs of their staff.
The African Stream story highlights the sorry state of global communications, where the United States has the power to choke, and even simply delete, media outlets that stand for an alternative vision of the world. Washington both funds thousands of journalists around the planet to produce pro-U.S. propaganda, and, through its close connections to Silicon Valley, has the power to destroy those that do not toe the line.
African Stream is far from the first independent, anti-imperialist news organization to have been targeted by Washington. MintPress itself has been repeatedly attacked and smeared as a secret Iranian, Chinese, Russian, Syrian, or even Venezuelan operation. Our reach on social media has been throttled, and we have been debanked by PayPal. Other leading alternative media outlets tell a similar story.
It is a similar story in Europe, where the region’s support for Israeli actions in Palestine has sparked a crackdown on independent journalism. British journalists Richard Medhurst and Asa Winstanley have had their homes raided by police, while the European Union has sanctioned Hüseyin Dogru for his coverage of pro-Palestine protests.
In what may prove to be their final post, on Tuesday, July 1, African Stream released a video of their staff dancing, accompanied by the words:
It’s tough to accept that we had to shut down over baseless accusations by the U.S. government. But instead of bowing out in silence, the team chose to resist, just as our ancestors often did, through dance. You can deplatform us. You can smear us. But you can’t stop us dancing.”
On the surface, the overt censorship of a Kenyan media outlet by the U.S. government may be a depressing story. Yet Kaballo remained upbeat about the situation, noting that the state of radical African media has drastically improved since 2022, with many channels taking up a pan-African, anti-imperialist message. “In the next few years, hopefully there will be 20 or 30 different versions of African Stream, hitting people with high-quality content,” he said.
Alan MacLeod
Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group and a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
