The Influence(r) War

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Donald Trump issued a controversial proclamation related to Israel and its relationship with other regional powers. At this point, that’s practically an evergreen statement, but the proclamation I’m referring to happened not as part of his early flurry of second-term actions, but in the dying days of his first term, in December 2020, when it perhaps flew under the radar amid the pandemic and Trump’s refusal to concede to Joe Biden. At the same time as Morocco agreed to normalize relations with Israel as part of the so-called “Abraham accords” (not that Morocco necessarily saw the deal in these terms), Trump officially recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, a formerly Spanish-occupied strip of land where Moroccan forces fought a war with a separatist movement prior to a 1991 ceasefire; that agreement theoretically set the stage for an independence referendum, but the vote never took place. At the time, the New York Times described Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s claim as “unusual” and putting the US “at odds with world opinion.” Amid rising military tensions, one analyst told the paper that Trump had just lit the situation on fire.

A full-scale conflict did not ensue—but Trump’s proclamation has nonetheless reverberated down the years, through the immediate region and beyond. Recently, it has been at least an indirect factor in a sharp rift between Algeria—which neighbors Morocco and Western Sahara, and has historically backed the latter’s separatist movement—and France, Algeria’s former colonizer. This story has in turn shined an interesting light on the fraught politics of memory, Algeria’s repression of freedoms of the press and broader expression, and the emergence of new media as a battleground for geopolitical influence, resulting in the recent arrests, in France, of several Algerian TikTok influencers. 

It’s a story, of course, that runs much deeper and wider than Trump’s proclamation. France colonized Algeria in the 1830s; Algeria eventually won independence in the 1960s following a brutal war. Emmanuel Macron—who became president of France in 2017, and was the first occupant of the office born after the end of that war—stated that addressing the lingering pain of the conflict would be a priority; during his campaign, he said that France’s colonization of Algeria was a “crime against humanity,” and he would later liken the importance of the task to a predecessor’s belated recognition, in 1995, of French complicity in the Holocaust. As Trump was signing his Western Sahara proclamation in 2020, Benjamin Stora, a leading historian, was putting the finishing touches on a report, commissioned by Macron, aimed at reconciliation and freeing French and Algerian people from being “prisoners” of the past. (Aside from the diplomatic relations between the two countries, Algerians make up France’s biggest immigrant community.) Stora made a number of recommendations, including a publishing exchange and the creation of a Franco-Algerian “youth office” that would promote the work of young creators on digital platforms. 

Macron has said recently that memorial reconciliation remains an objective for him; in November, he recognized French responsibility for the killing of a totemic Algerian revolutionary leader during the war. And yet the years since Stora’s report have been defined more by tension than rapprochement. In 2021, Macron triggered a diplomatic crisis when he said, in remarks reported by Le Monde, that Algeria is run by a “military-political system” that has pushed a “hatred of France,” and also appeared to question whether the Algerian nation existed prior to colonization; Le Monde suggested that he had been disappointed by Algeria’s frosty reception to the Stora report. In 2023, there was another crisis—this time linked to press freedom. Amira Bouraoui—an activist and host on the independent station Radio M, who has dual Algerian and French nationality—fled to neighboring Tunisia amid a crackdown on media; Tunisia threatened to send her back, but France intervened and allowed her to travel to Paris, where she went into exile. Algeria accused France of “exfiltrating” Bouraoui and seeking a definitive diplomatic “rupture.” 

These flash points more or less fizzled—but then, last summer, Macron effectively recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, an abrupt change in France’s position. There were multiple reasons for this, but as Frédéric Bobin, who covers North Africa for Le Monde, explained on the paper’s flagship daily podcast last week, Trump’s prior recognition of Morocco’s claim was significant—in beginning to realign the international community on the question (Spain, for example, followed in 2022), but also in helping to catalyze a diplomatic break between Morocco and Algeria that made it harder for France to align with both countries at once (even if, as Bobin noted, French officials have denied that their relations with Morocco and Algeria are a “zero-sum game”). Macron’s move infuriated Algeria, which withdrew its ambassador from Paris. An Algerian newspaper wrote that tensions with France had reached their highest level since Algeria became independent.

Those tensions have only risen since then—and have again played out on the fields of freedom of expression and media. One strange episode last fall revolved around a novel by Kamel Daoud, a Franco-Algerian writer, that took as its subject matter the horrific civil war that rocked Algeria in the nineties and early two thousands, which Daoud had covered as a journalist. The book won the prestigious prix Goncourt in France, but was attacked in Algeria, where there is a powerful official omertà around the conflict. In November, a survivor went on TV and accused Daoud of using her life story as the basis for the book, without her consent; she said that she had shared personal details in confidence with Daoud’s wife, who is a psychiatrist. Daoud strongly denied this, and said later that Algeria’s ruling regime had orchestrated the allegation while weaponizing its “media machine” against him and the book. The regime, he said, saw the award of the Goncourt as French memorial meddling, and as recognition of a man considered a “traitor” by those who see France as an “eternal enemy.”

Also in November, Algeria arrested a different Franco-Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, on his arrival in the country from France. Initially, his status was murky, but the arrest appeared to be linked to comments that he made to a right-wing French media outlet (where he serves on an advisory committee) in which he said that swaths of Algeria historically were part of Morocco; he was later charged with undermining “the integrity of national territory.” (Bobin, of Le Monde, noted recently that Sansal’s arrest stemmed from the same “ultrasensitivity” about Algeria’s borders that underpinned the regime’s furious response to Macron’s Western Sahara decision.) Sansal, who is seventy-five, remains in detention, and has been in and out of the hospital; Daoud, a friend, has accused Algeria of keeping him as a “diplomatic hostage.” Last month, Macron accused Algeria of “dishonoring” itself in its treatment of Sansal. Newspapers in Algeria again reacted with fury, evoking colonial “demons,” razed villages, and napalm to suggest that France, with its colonial history, was the dishonorable party.

By this point, another flash point had emerged, this time in the realm of new media: in early January, reports circulated that French officials had arrested a trio of Algerian social media “influencers,” based in different parts of France, on charges of posting videos that incited violence against opponents of the Algerian regime—and expressing hatred toward Jews and other targets—that were viewed hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok. France tried to deport one of the influencers to Algeria, but Algeria refused to take him, triggering another exchange of recriminations. Other influencers have since been arrested on similar grounds. As Bobin has reported, there’s no smoking gun proving that the Algerian regime coordinated the influencers’ posts, but they were remarkably similar, and often came from accounts that weren’t explicitly political in the past. One French-based critic of the regime alleged the involvement of a businessman close to Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Algeria’s president, pointing to a video in which he referred to YouTubers as a form of “mujahideen.” (The businessman later said that this comment was a joke and had no aggressive intent.)  

It has been suggested that the regime might be weaponizing anti-French hatred and a campaign of transnational repression because it is fearful for its survival—not only in the context of Morocco’s status on its borders, but also the recent collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and attendant anxiety that it could cause a wider resurgence of Arab Spring–style sentiment. Starting in 2019, a wave of protests known as the Hirak (or “movement”) sprang up against the Algerian regime; they precipitated the ouster of the longtime former president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, but not a transition to democracy, and under Tebboune, the regime has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn. Unsurprisingly, press freedom has suffered, as we documented in this newsletter in 2021 and then again in 2023, when my colleague Mercy Tonnia Orengo reported on the arrest of Ihsane el-Kadi, a prominent journalist at Radio M, which was subsequently shuttered. In November, el-Kadi was freed as part of a broader set of presidential pardons. But the regime has continued to arrest and harass journalists.

Where now, then? Algeria’s repression of journalists and intellectuals doesn’t look likely to conclude any time soon, though the diplomatic crisis with France triggered by Macron’s Western Sahara declaration will likely come to some sort of end at some point. (Last week, Tebboune said that he is keen for the countries to start talking again in order to avoid an “irreparable” separation, following similar noises from the French foreign ministry, though the details remain hazy.) The exceedingly complicated and painful legacy of France’s actions in Algeria will continue to be complicated. The politics of memory—and also of the present day—will continue to play out in a variety of media theaters, from the bounded pages of the book to the open-ended anarchy of social media and our noisy new information climate. 

Trump’s 2020 proclamation on the Western Sahara didn’t cause any of these things, at a deeper level. But it did show, as his second term marches on apace, how flourishes of his pen—even those that don’t make many headlines in the US—can have diverse and sometimes surprising knock-on effects, or at least insert themselves into other stories, all around the world. Morocco, for its part, is reportedly delighted that Trump is back.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, a federal judge accused the White House of defying his earlier order to unblock federal spending that budget officials had previously ordered paused—the first time that the judiciary has explicitly said that the Trump administration is disobeying a court order. The news exacerbated a growing sense that the US is entering a “constitutional crisis,” a pair of words that showed up in numerous headlines yesterday; at the top of her show on CNN, Kaitlan Collins referred to “warnings that the US is dangerously close” to such a state of affairs. As Adam Liptak writes in the New York Times, however, there is no “universally accepted definition” of the term. “It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch,” Liptak writes. “It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.”

• Last week, the Federal Communications Commission, which has already taken a number of aggressive actions against media companies under its new chair, Brendan Carr, pledged to probe KCBS, a radio station in California that had covered an ongoing federal immigration raid, for supposedly interfering with it. That fits an emerging pattern, CJR’s Josh Hersh reports, of administration figures and their supporters characterizing reporting on raids as inappropriate “leaks.” Chris Vanderveen, a journalist at one affected outlet, 9News in Denver, scoffed at this idea: “The worst-kept secret in the world is when you put a bunch of vehicles and personnel dressed in fatigues in shopping-center parking lots,” he said.

• Yesterday, Fox Corporation announced that it has acquired Red Seat Ventures, a digital media company that distributed true-crime podcasts and right-wing shows hosted by figures including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. Red Seat will operate independently within Tubi, a digital-focused arm of Fox, and none of its hosts will report to Fox executives, though as the Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum notes, the deal nonetheless moves Fox Corporation “into the heart of the online ‘creator economy,’ where media personalities who once relied on old-school corporate distributors—like, say, the cable networks owned by Fox—have struck out on their own.”

• The New Yorker is out with a special issue marking its centenary, which falls this year; the issue has six different covers, each featuring a riff on the magazine’s iconic cover character, Eustace Tilley, and features both new reporting and reflections on the publication’s past. In one essay, David Remnick, the current editor in chief, traces The New Yorker’s “inauspicious beginnings, when the whole thing nearly folded because of a disastrous night at the card table, to its emergence as an ineffable blend of humor, art, deep reporting, critical essays, poetry, and fiction.”

• And last night, Nick Robinson, a senior political journalist at the BBC in the UK, posted on X that he was launching a cryptocurrency branded for Today, a prestigious BBC program that he cohosts. But the post wasn’t genuine—in fact, Robinson’s account was hacked after he fell for an apparent phishing email. On air earlier today, Robinson referred to the post as “complete nonsense” (albeit “quite entertaining nonsense”) and advised listeners not to “click on everything you see.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.