The coalition is circulating a petition to gather signatures to demand African Stream’s reinstatement and misinformation retractions.

NOTE: The founder of African Stream, Ahmed Kaballo, on Clearing the FOG. Listen here.

Several African-led grassroots organizations and independent media outlets have coalesced to launch the Coalition to Defend African Stream, an initiative to demand the U.S. State Department and tech giants reinstate African Stream’s accounts following tech bans in September that denied 2.5-million subscribers their human right to access Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist news across several platforms.

African Stream is a Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist digital media outlet that had as many as hundreds of millions of people watching, engaging and sharing its journalism prior to the bans.

Following U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s September 13 press briefing, in which he referred to African Stream as “secretly run” by Russian-state TV network RT and showcasing “Kremlin propagandists,” YouTube, Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads), Stripe, TikTok, and Google banned or suspended African Stream’s accounts. The outlet can now only be found on X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Patreon and Rumble. 

The Coalition to Defend African Stream asserts the U.S. State Department and the aforementioned tech companies have violated 8 billion people’s human right to access information, the right to the truth and the right to freedom of expression, as laid out by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The coalition sees these tech bans as part of a century-long history of the U.S. government smearing African liberation fighters—whether communist or not—as “communists,” “Soviet-linked” and “Russian-backed.” The Russiagate narrative that led to the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” designation can also be couched within this history. 

“The U.S. government’s decision to censor an independent pan-Africanist media platform reveals their deep fear of media that exposes the violence and failures of U.S. imperialism globally,” said Manolo De Los Santos, executive director at New York-based movement incubator The People’s Forum, which sits on the coalition’s Steering Committee. “We wholeheartedly support the global struggle against this censorship of African Stream. We call for its reinstatement and demand a retraction of the misleading claims made against it.”

The Coalition to Defend African Stream makes four demands of the U.S. State Department and tech giants.

1. 1. The U.S. State Department must retract its September 13 statement that African Stream is “secretly run” by Russian-state TV network RT and that it showcases “Kremlin propagandists,”
   2. Stanford University must retract its unscientific “analysis” published on September 17,
   3. all other mainstream and small media outlets must retract articles that misinform the public about African Stream, and
   4. YouTube, Meta, TikTok and Google must reinstate African Stream’s accounts.

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“This coalition marks a significant step in the fight for the fundamental rights of Black people worldwide,” said the International Bureau of France- and Africa-based grassroots organization Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine (LDNA or Black African Defense League in English), another coalition’s Steering Committee member. “We are joining forces to defend human rights and combat all forms of systemic oppression that continue to target African and Afro-descendant populations. In these critical times, following the LDNA president also recently being banned on social media, it is essential to strengthen unity and solidarity among Pan-African activist organizations.”

The Steering Committee includes All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa (Africa), Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine (Black African Defense League) (France and Africa), The People’s Forum (New York), Voices With Vision (Washington, D.C.) and West Africa Weekly.

By signing the petition, an individual or an organization becomes a member of the Coalition to Defend African Stream. The petition can be found at defendafricanstream.com/petition. 

The coalition encourages petition signers to spread the word by:

1. • making videos,
   • adding the coalition’s logo (found in English, French and Spanish) to graphics and paraphernalia, and/or
   • using the hashtag #DefendAfricanStream in addition to #WeAreAllAfricanStream

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