MAGA world posts a lot about Africa.
A lot is wrong.
A CCIJ examination of social media posts on Truth Social reveals extensive false information about events in Africa. It comes as the Trump administration has cut foreign assistance to the continent.
Andrew W. Lehren and Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
June 12, 2026
When President Trump met in May 2025 at the White House with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, presenting a video that he falsely claimed showed massive killings of white South African farmers, fact-checkers were quick to point out that Trump was incorrect.
At one point, Trump held out a printout of an article accompanied by an image that showed a news photograph that, he falsely claimed, showed “these are all white farmers that are being buried.” In fact, it did not support the president’s assertion. The Reuters’ image that Trump showed was not even from South Africa. In reality, it showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The corpses were casualties of strife between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda-backed rebels.
Trump’s claims of death rates were wildly inflated. Pointing to one video clip, Trump said, “These are burial sites right here – burial sites – over a thousand – of White farmers.” But the footage, showing crosses along a South African roadside, was actually from a temporary 2020 memorial established by protesters to mark the murder of one white farming couple earlier that year.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly responded to questions from the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) about Trump’s claims by praising him for “courageously calling attention to the harrowing stories of Afrikaners.”
The incident of false and misleading statements is far from isolated. When the right-wing Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement looks at Africa as a whole, it is filled with far more misinformation than just the conversations about white South African farmers.
The Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) examined thousands of conversations on the social media platform Truth Social, popular with many conservatives.
Truth Social, works like Twitter/X, is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, a publicly traded company founded by the president. In December 2024, Politico reported that Trump put his $4 billion stake in the parent company of Truth Social into a trust controlled by one of his sons. Trump’s MAGA movement holds unfettered online conversations on the platform.
CCIJ used the disinformation tracking platform Junkipedia to analyze social media posts. It is a project by the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, part of the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Junkipedia is a vast repository designed in part to help journalists and researchers examine disinformation on social media platforms. It examined posts for African nations as well as interactions, likes and reposts.
CCIJ found amplification of Trump’s false claims about African people and countries, the posting of unverified claims about a Jan. 6 protester, and the citation of scientific studies with African subjects that endorsed the use of the drug ivermectin, a dewormer, to help treat the COVID-19 vaccine.
Amplifying Trump’s claims
When Trump’s MAGA movement discusses Africa on Truth Social, false narratives amplify some of his claims.
This included posts made by account holders like Lara Logan, who has close to half a million followers. A once vaunted television news correspondent from South Africa who took a well-documented hard turn to the right and to conspiracy-thinking, she is an influencer spreading disinformation about the killing of whites in South Africa.
In late May and early June, 2025 she repeatedly took to Truth Social to promote her conversation with South African businessman Rob Hersov, who spoke about whites in South Africa experiencing an “economic genocide.” Hersov also compared the country to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. While acknowledging that the extermination of whites was not happening in South Africa, he said that “probably seven” of 10 elements of genocide were in place in the country.
Neither Logan nor Hersov responded to requests for comment.
During a weekly address to the nation in March 2025, Ramaphosa labeled the narrative that people of a certain race or culture were being targeted for persecution as “completely false.”
Other Truth Social users and accounts amplified Trump’s denigrating comments about African people and countries. In December 2025, he confirmed — for the first time — remarks that he made during his first term in office, when, in a closed-door meeting with senators, he called African nations “shithole countries.”
Also in December, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage.”
The Trump administration did not answer CCIJ’s requests for comment about why he made those statements.
Truth Social accounts like The New York Post, The Western Journal, Fox News and The Washington Examiner sometimes parroted and sometimes critically responded to what he said about Somalis. These accounts and others that engaged with the comment had more than 20 million followers on Truth Social.
Another Truth Social account also linked the presence of asylum seekers from Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe, among other countries, in Ireland with residents feeling fear.
In a comment to EuroVerify, Ireland’s Department of Justice said that it was “not aware of any credible evidence that would suggest a causal link between immigration and crime in Ireland.”
In a comment in August 2025 to EuroVerify, Ireland’s Department of Justice said that it was “not aware of any credible evidence that would suggest a causal link between immigration and crime in Ireland.”
In June 2026, as this story was about to be published, a Sudanese immigrant in Belfast was charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie. The incident — including a video of the knife attack shared on social media — has been linked to sparking protests and unrest. Claire Hanna, leader of the the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), told the BBC that the anti-immigrant violence constituted a “race-based pogrom”. Ogilvie’s family has asked that the incident not be used “to divide people or fuel hostility”.
Posting unverified claims
Other Truth Social accounts posted an unverified claim that Kenya improperly detained Isaac Sturgeon, a Jan. 6 protester who fled there after the riots.
Then 32 years old and a Montana resident, he flew to Kenya in the wake of the January 6 violent protests in Washington, D.C., after the FBI shared pictures of him on its website and asked the public to help identify him, according to Pulse Live Kenya, a Kenyan news outlet.
The Star newspaper in Kenya described how he was later detained and reportedly deported from the country after the FBI issued an arrest warrant. The headline and subhead read, “Sturgeon underestimated Kenyan security system. Sturgeon made a big mistake if he thought he would not be found by the Kenyan security services.”
The newspaper noted, “Ironically Sturgeon fled to what his idol President Donald Trump described as a ‘shithole’ country. He made a big mistake if he thought he would be safe in Kenya.”
Sturgeon could not be reached for comment.
“Kenya closely operates with international security agencies such as the FBI,” the story continued. “There is a two way exchange of information and assistance. Sturgeon was deluded if he thought he was vanishing into a dark place.”
He was later sentenced for assaulting a law enforcement officer in connection with the Jan. 6 riots, including shoving a barricade into police that day. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Sturgeon was among the violent protesters who were pardoned by Trump when he began his second term as president.
But j6PatriotNews, a Truth Social account with close to 700 followers that posts updates about Jan. 6 protesters it describes as patriots, claimed that, in 2025, Sturgeon was detained for days in a Kenyan airport. That post is not substantiated by any credible news account or public record.
The office of U.S. Sen. Daines (R-MT) did not respond to requests from CCIJ to confirm j6PatriotNews’ assertion that Daines mobilized his team to help Sturgeon and kept in touch with his family.
j6PatriotNews did not respond to requests from CCIJ for comment.
Endorsing Ivermectin
Peter McCullough, a doctor with more than 48,000 followers on Truth Social, did respond to CCIJ’s questions about his March 2025 post that cited studies from Zimbabwe and Nigeria and one from the United States that he co-authored. The post touted the benefits of an ivermectin-based multidrug regimen in treating people with COVID-19.
The lead author of the Zimbabwean study was Jacqueline “Jackie” Carey Stone, a doctor who was based in Harare and died in 2024. She told interviewer Christine Clark in 2021 that the use of ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19 in Zimbabwe had resulted in a tenfold reduction in mortality.
In the 2022 study for which she was the lead author she wrote that the improved flow of oxygen shortly after the first dose of ivermectin established a “cause-and-effect” clinical benefit for IV-based combination treatment of COVID-19.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said ivermectin is not a cure for Covid. “The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals,” the agency stated.
A January 2025 meta-analysis and review of 28 randomized controlled trials published in the Indian Journal of Community Medicine found ivermectin was not more effective than either a placebo or standard medical care in reducing the risk of death, shortening hospital stays, or improving patients’ condition. The same article did not include the study from Nigeria in its review because it said that it used an “inappropriate” basis for comparison.
Olufemi Babalola, a doctor and professor at Bingham University in Nigeria, told CCIJ that he stands by its results. “Ivermectin is an antiviral drug, not a very strong one, but it definitely has antiviral properties, but more importantly, it has an effect of reversing the effect of hypoxia, which the patients with COVID-19 have,” Babalola said.
Babalola referred CCIJ to a meta-analysis of 106 research papers which he said confirmed that ivermectin has a positive effect in reducing COVID-19’s viral load and reversing the effects of hypoxia. The study is dedicated to “those who risked their career to save lives under extreme censorship and persecution from authorities and media that have not even reviewed most of the science.”
Stone and McCullough are listed among the doctors to whom the paper is dedicated.
Stone had her license stripped by medical authorities in Zimbabwe on charges that she disputed, according to News Hawks. The American Board of Internal Medicine listed McCullough’s certifications for internal medicine and cardiovascular disease as revoked. He told CCIJ that he “voluntarily resigned” in November, 2024 and that his dispute with the organization was not related to ivermectin.
In 2025, Future Microbiology retracted the study McCullough co-authored, saying that concerns had been raised about its methodology, patient enrollment process and data analysis following its publication. “Upon review of all materials, we were unable to confirm the integrity of the study design and the reported findings,” the journal wrote. “Therefore, the editorial team no longer has confidence in the reported conclusions and has decided to retract the article.”
McCullough said that the retraction violated publication ethics guidelines and was later published in the two-part, peer-reviewed study he referred to in the Truth Social post.
10,000 more Afrikaners to the United States
Misinformation about African nations spread on Truth Social during a time when the Trump administration has drastically cut U.S. assistance to Africa.
Kelly did not respond to CCIJ’s question about a possible link between Trump’s denigration of African countries and the administration’s aid cuts, speaking instead about his commitment to speak about what she described as “injustices” toward Afrikaners.
In late May, 2026, nearly a year after his White House encounter with Ramaphosa, he did more than speak. He moved ahead with plans to allow 10,000 more white South Africans into the United States as refugees, Reuters reported.
Refugee programs remained closed to people from every other country in the world beside white Afrikaners from South Africa.
Costing about $100 million to implement, the emergency notice submitted to Congress repeated claims of “far-reaching government-sponsored race-based discrimination” and cited “escalating hostility” that heightened the risks to Afrikaners in South Africa.
Critics charged that these kinds of misinformation are harmful.
– Ro Khanna and Jonathan Jackson, two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives
“President Trump’s claims that white farmers are being systematically killed is a dangerous lie,” according to Ro Khanna and Jonathan Jackson, two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. They issued the statement shortly after the South African president met with Trump.
“While Trump and Vance deport people without due process, the administration is using this lie to justify giving white farmers refugee status in the US,” they said. “His false narrative of a ‘white genocide’ is profoundly insulting and harmful to those who have faced centuries of discrimination and violence under colonialism and apartheid in South Africa.”
The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided support for this story.
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