Operation Carthage: How Tunisian firm “Ureputation” played an important role in African elections ?

A Tunisia-based digital communications firm operated a sophisticated digital campaign involving multiple social media platforms and websites in an attempt to influence the country’s 2019 presidential election, as well as other recent elections in Africa.The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab( DFRLab) uncovered dozens of online assets with connections to Tunisian digital communications firm Ureputation.

On June 5, 2020, after conducting its own investigation, Facebook announced it had taken down more than 900 assets affiliated with the UReputation operation, including 182 user accounts, 446 pages, and 96 groups, as well as 209 Instagram accounts.

Operation Carthage, as the disinformation campaign was called, used online social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to target the countries’ voters.

Now, in the shadow of “Operation Carthage,” a Cambridge Analytica-style scandal that has revealed attempts to leverage the platform to influence presidential elections in Tunisia and countries in Africa, Facebook is remaining tight-lipped about what happened.

On its website, UReputation acknowledges its role as a communications agency which specialises in “digital intelligence and cyber influence”. This work includes “sending targeted messages to specific categories of recipients to influence their perception of a brand or personality”.

An example of one of these contacts and the effect he had on the influence of an election was that of Tunisian-French businessman Lotfi Ben Hadj — an avid supporter of the Tunisian presidential candidate Nabil Karoui last year — who used the operation to drive support for Karoui and got him to the runoff stage before he lost in October.

The revelation of Operation Carthage and the Tunisian firm’s influence of the election processes in African states comes as other Middle Eastern governments and their democratic processes have been under the influences of disinformation campaigns, with Facebook at the forefront of the controversy. Last month, the social media giant announced that it dismantled a disinformation campaign by the Iranian authorities which used its state broadcaster to operate hundreds of fake social media accounts. Facebook has also been accused in recent months of having a severely anti-Palestine stance, with pro-Israel trolls gaining influence over the social media network.