Mapping Disinformation: Thematic Risks & Narratives Ahead of Cameroon’s 2025 Elections – A Social Media Landscape Analysis (Jan–Jul 2025)

By: Mustapha Lawal

Cameroon is scheduled to hold a presidential election on October 12. The country is experiencing a reduction in the space for political opposition, and the factors that led to conflicts in past elections have not been addressed. However, as Cameroon heads toward its 2025 elections, disinformation is already shaping the political conversation across major social media platforms. 

FactCheckAfrica conducted a six-month social media monitoring of Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok between January and July 2025, which reveals a volatile mix of recycled conflict propaganda, diaspora-fuelled polarisation, and new forms of digital manipulation. While many of these narratives echo older grievances from the Anglophone crisis, they are now recirculating in ways that risk undermining voter trust and inflaming tensions during the electoral season.

This examined public disinformation activity on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok between January 1 and July 31, 2025, with a geographic focus on Cameroon’s Anglophone regions and diaspora networks in Europe and North America. Content in English, French, Pidgin, and Camfranglais was included. Private messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger were excluded for both ethical and methodological reasons. This report is therefore based solely on publicly accessible posts, pages, hashtags, and videos.

Narratives That Define the Landscape

1. One of the most prominent strands of disinformation centres on claims that elections will not take place in Anglophone regions or that votes cast there will not be counted. This narrative, often spread under hashtags like #NoElectionsInAmbazonia, draws legitimacy from the real history of voter suppression and violence in the conflict zones. By amplifying the message that participation is futile, these claims risk depressing turnout in regions already struggling with insecurity. A similar cycle of delegitimisation played out in 2018, when international observers noted widespread doubts about the credibility of results in conflict-affected areas. 
2. Closely linked is the spread of separatist propaganda, repackaged as electoral discourse. TikTok has seen a wave of short videos allegedly showing Ambazonian fighters vowing to disrupt voting, though many of these clips rely on old footage from earlier phases of the conflict. These viral snippets blur timelines and contexts, reinforcing public fear that violence is inevitable on election day. Fact-checkers have repeatedly shown how such videos are recycled from past incidents and AI-generated, yet their emotional impact continues to outweigh corrections.
3. Another stream of disinformation is the diaspora-driven claim that President Paul Biya is incapacitated or secretly dead. Posts on X originating from accounts in Europe and North America repeatedly recycle rumours about Biya’s health, often accompanied by images from unrelated events. While multiple outlets have debunked these death rumours multiple times, their persistence feeds distrust in official communication and fuels speculation about succession. Such narratives tend to migrate quickly into Facebook discussion groups inside Cameroon, where they spark heated debates framed around legitimacy and leadership.
4. Beyond political disinformation, ethnic and identity-based content circulates with troubling intensity. In Francophone-dominated Facebook spaces, Anglophone grievances are often caricatured as extremist demands for secession. Conversely, English- and Pidgin-speaking networks portray the Francophone-led state as an occupier incapable of reform. Meanwhile, Camfranglais memes trivialise these fractures by turning them into punchlines, which makes them more palatable and shareable but also more insidious. What begins as “joking online” can, over time, normalise dangerous stereotypes and deepen division.
5. Finally, the information ecosystem is punctuated by security panic posts, especially on TikTok. Clips showing alleged ambushes, caches of weapons, or warnings of impending attacks often rack up tens of thousands of views. Closer examination shows that many of these posts either recycle unrelated footage or exaggerate minor security incidents. The cumulative effect is to heighten public anxiety, making communities more susceptible to displacement and more distrustful of the electoral process. Experience in Cameroon shows that such fear-driven narratives can provide cover for both state repression and armed group disruption.

Why This Matters?

Taken together, these narratives suggest that the disinformation environment ahead of Cameroon’s 2025 elections is fragmented, multilingual, and emotionally charged. Unlike the misinformation seen in everyday settings, the posts circulating now are often tied to strategic goals: discouraging participation, delegitimising the state, or inflaming intercommunal suspicion.

The role of diaspora accounts is particularly significant. Monitoring shows that narratives seeded abroad frequently find traction at home, amplified by both sympathisers and adversaries. In some cases, coordinated campaigns based in Europe and North America have introduced hashtags that later dominate Cameroonian Facebook and X trends. This “boomerang effect” not only intensifies domestic polarisation but also fuels official suspicion of diaspora media voices.

Limitations and Safeguards

This analysis is limited to publicly accessible posts and content on Facebook, X, and TikTok. Private WhatsApp chats, Telegram groups, and closed Facebook groups, which are important channels of disinformation, were not included, meaning the full scale of circulation is likely larger than captured here. Additionally, TikTok’s lack of robust archival tools makes historical tracking difficult, so viral posts are sometimes documented only after they peak. For ethical reasons, this report paraphrases rather than reproduces harmful posts and does not expose individual users unless they are already public figures. The focus is on patterns, narratives, and amplification, not on naming or shaming individual accounts.

What Needs to Happen?

To prevent the erosion of trust ahead of the 2025 elections, Cameroonian fact-checkers and journalists will need to intensify their monitoring of diaspora-driven hashtags and recycled conflict content. Civil society groups should invest in multilingual debunking, ensuring that corrections are issued not only in French and English but also in Pidgin and Camfranglais, which dominate youth discourse. Platforms, for their part, must prioritise content moderation support for Cameroon during the election cycle, particularly in identifying old conflict footage recirculating as new events.

Without these efforts, the disinformation landscape risks reinforcing pre-existing fractures, leaving the electoral process vulnerable to both manipulation and rejection. The 2025 vote will test not only Cameroon’s democratic resilience but also the capacity of its information ecosystem to withstand the distortions of the digital age.