The Execution of a TikToker and the Battle for Mali’s Soul: How Imperial Legacies and New Media Fuel a Perpetual War

Introduction: A Tragedy in the Digital Age

On November 7, 2025, a twenty-year-old Malian woman named Mariam Cissé was publicly executed. Her crime, in the eyes of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), was using her TikTok platform, followed by 100,000 people, to share pro-army videos. This act of barbaric violence is not an isolated incident but a bloody punctuation mark in a complex, multi-layered conflict that has ravaged Mali since 2012. It is a war fought with guns, drones, and mercenaries, but increasingly, and perhaps decisively, it is a war fought through smartphone screens and livestreams. The story of Mariam Cissé and the rise of Mali’s ‘videomen’ exposes the brutal intersection of terrorism, great power competition, and a failed Western approach to media that is utterly divorced from the realities of the Global South.

Facts and Context: The Tangled Web of Mali’s Conflict

The roots of the current crisis trace back to 2012, with a Tuareg separatist rebellion, the seizure of northern cities by jihadist groups, and the subsequent intervention of UN peacekeepers and French forces under operations like Serval and Barkhane. This initial foreign intervention, framed as stabilization and counter-terrorism, failed to bring lasting peace. Coups in 2020 and 2021 brought Colonel Assimi Goïta to power, who dramatically pivoted Mali’s foreign policy: expelling French forces and UN peacekeepers and turning to the Russian mercenary Wagner Group for security support.

Concurrently, a profound media transformation was underway. Mali’s information space is now dominated by ‘videomen’—young, predominantly male smartphone broadcasters who conduct marathon livestreams in Bamanankan, reaching hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of viewers. The most prominent, Gandhi Malien, boasts over 1.8 million followers. These figures did not emerge as Russian creations; they are a domestic political phenomenon, born in the mid-2010s and bankrolled by Malian politicians across the spectrum in exchange for editorial influence. They played a key role in the 2020 protests that helped bring the current junta to power, with figures like movement spokesman Choguel Maïga (later the junta’s prime minister) holding press conferences explicitly for their livestreams.

The Great Power Play: Russia’s Asymmetric Advantage

While the videomen are a Malian creation, they have become a potent vector for Russian influence. As documented, Russia has been linked to a significant portion of disinformation campaigns in Africa. Russia’s strategy is not to create from scratch but to work through existing markets. The ‘African Initiative,’ successor to Wagner’s propaganda arm, trains Malian influencers in content production and pro-Russian framing. A telling example followed France’s handover of the Gossi base in 2022: when French drone footage showed Wagner operatives burying bodies, a fake account posing as a Malian veteran blamed French troops. The Malian government, in turn, accused France of espionage, rejecting its account entirely. This incident is a masterclass in information laundering, where a local, authentic-seeming voice is weaponized to amplify a foreign agenda, exploiting legitimate anti-colonial sentiments for geopolitical gain.

Russia’s approach is tactical and modern. It targets the production skills needed for the new media landscape—short, engaging vertical video—through ventures like the Bamako-based Russian School of Journalism, which teaches headline crafting and weaponized ‘fact-checking’ to discredit opponents. This stands in stark contrast to the West’s legacy approach.

The Western Failure: A Condescending and Obsolete Model

Western support, led by the United States and France, has clung to a media-assistance model built for a bygone broadcast era: journalist training, newsroom grants, and traditional fact-checking. This model assumes a Westphalian framework of institutional media that simply does not reflect the consumption habits of Mali’s youth, who get news from individual creators on TikTok and Facebook. Worse, Western attempts to directly engage in this space have been clumsy and counterproductive. France ran a military-linked network of fake accounts, some posing as fact-checkers, which was exposed and damaged its credibility. Similar Pentagon operations elsewhere have provoked backlash. As research shows, audiences disengage from content they perceive as externally directed. The Western model is seen not as partnership but as patronage—a neo-colonial imposition that lacks authenticity and resonance.

This failure is compounded by a form of digital apartheid. Major platforms like YouTube and TikTok systematically exclude creators in Mali and across Africa from their monetization programs (YouTube’s Partner Program, TikTok’s Creator Rewards). This denies local voices a sustainable economic model, leaving them vulnerable to the very foreign patronage—from Russian or domestic political sponsors—that corrupts the information ecosystem.

Opinion: Sovereignty, Exploitation, and the Path Forward for the Global South

The execution of Mariam Cissé and the saga of Mali’s videomen is a microcosm of the broader struggle facing the Global South. It is a struggle for narrative sovereignty in a world where information is the ultimate strategic resource. The West’s approach is fundamentally flawed because it is rooted in a paternalistic, neo-colonial mindset. It seeks to ‘counter’ narratives rather than empower authentic local ones. It invests in institutions that mirror its own, ignoring the organic, decentralized, and deeply personal media landscape that has arisen in places like Mali. When it does engage directly, as with France’s fake accounts, it replicates the very covert manipulation it condemns, revealing a profound hypocrisy that erodes its moral authority.

Russia, for all its cynical imperialism, understands this asymmetry. It does not preach; it co-opts. It provides tools and amplifies existing grievances, particularly justifiable anti-Western sentiment stemming from centuries of colonial and post-colonial exploitation. It positions itself, however falsely, as an anti-imperial alternative, exploiting the vacuum left by Western failure.

The solution, as the article suggests, is not more sophisticated ‘counter-narratives’ but a fundamental shift towards funding skills and rewarding engagement for local creators. The proposal for a fund that pays a living wage to a diverse group of Malian creators, with payments tied to engagement and adherence to basic accuracy standards (enforced by a charter, not foreign editorial control), is precisely the type of initiative that respects agency. It acknowledges that in today’s world, a creator like Gandhi Malien or a potential successor to Mariam Cissé performs a public service comparable to traditional journalism and deserves similar support.

This is not merely a technical media fix. It is a question of justice and equity in the global digital order. The exclusion of African creators from platform monetization is an economic extension of colonial-era extraction. Demanding that YouTube and TikTok expand these programs is a fight for digital decolonization.

The tragic death of Mariam Cissé reminds us that this information war has a devastating human cost. It is fought over the hearts and minds of people who have endured terrorism, foreign military interventions, coups, and economic despair. The West must abandon its arrogant, one-size-fits-all ‘rule of law’ of media development. It must stop seeing nations like Mali as mere chessboards for great power competition or passive recipients of aid. It must instead support platforms for genuine, independent, and locally resonant voices to flourish. The future of the Sahel, and indeed much of the Global South, will be shaped not by which foreign power crafts the most convincing lie, but by which system allows its own people to tell their most powerful truth. The memory of Mariam Cissé demands nothing less.