(Bloomberg) -- Before he became Senegal’s youngest-ever president one month ago, Bassirou Diomaye Faye had spent much of the previous year in jail.

The 44-year-old tax inspector and former secretary-general of Senegal’s main opposition party was arrested almost a year ago on charges of spreading fake news, after accusing judges in a Facebook post of carrying out the political agenda of then-president Macky Sall. Faye spent 11 months in detainment before being released ten days before the March 24 vote.

For more than five decades, spreading fake news wasn’t a charge that typically resulted in jail time in Senegal. But in the build-up to this year’s election, the one that saw Faye skyrocket to victory, it was the official reason for locking up many anti-government voices.

“The penalty for that offense was hardened to muzzle citizens who spoke up against the government,” said Moussa Sarr, a lawyer who defended Faye pro-bono alongside hundreds of other journalists and government critics.

As a growing number of governments around the world take steps to criminalize the spread of misinformation — already punishable with jail time in countries including Bangladesh, Singapore, Turkey, Kenya and Malaysia — Senegal’s election illustrates how such laws can be used to consolidate power and chill political speech. At the same time, it demonstrates how such efforts don’t always go to plan.  

Article 255, which criminalizes “the publication, dissemination, disclosure or reproduction” of false or fake news, has been law in Senegal since 1965. Yet prosecutors in the West African country have increasingly seized on it in recent years, and especially since anti-government protests began gaining momentum in March 2021.

Spokespeople for Senegal’s ministries of communications and justice did not respond to calls, text messages and letters seeking comment on whether dissenting voices had been targeted under the pretext of fighting fake news before the change of power last month. Sall maintained that Senegal’s judiciary was independent, and in a bid to calm tensions before the vote, he offered amnesty to anyone charged with political and protest-linked offenses in the past three years, freeing hundreds of people from detention.

Senegal’s law does not define what constitutes false news, and critics say that the government deemed factually accurate social media posts to be illegal when they’ve gone against the official line. Fake news has “become an excuse for governments to clamp down on dissent,” said Gbenga Sesan, the executive director of Paradigm Initiative, a pan-African organization that advocates for digital inclusion and rights.

This, human rights experts say, has degraded the public’s trust in government — and it helped contribute to the downfall of Macky Sall’s ruling coalition.

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Faye’s presidential victory was a surprise even to him. Slender and soft-spoken, his closest brushes with public service before assuming the country’s highest office were a failed mayoral bid in his rural hometown and an attempt to run for parliament before his candidacy was denied over a technicality. He only got word in late January, while in jail, that he’d been selected as his coalition’s backup candidate.

That was when Ousmane Sonko, the opposition candidate and Faye’s mentor, was disqualified from running over a libel conviction. In the three years leading up to the vote, Sonko had accumulated a litany of charges – including spreading fake news — which fuelled a nationwide protest movement and cemented his status as Sall’s fiercest opponent. As his popularity grew, so did that of Pastef, the party he founded in 2014, which gained a following among young Senegalese frustrated by the lack of jobs and opportunity in the country.

Senegal has long been considered one of West Africa’s more politically stable nations, yet it’s been on shaky ground since 2021, when the US pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House downgraded its ranking to only “partly free.” That year, thousands of Sonko supporters took to the streets to protest rape charges leveled against him, which they believed were politically motivated. More than 1,000 activists, journalists and politicians are believed to have been arrested between then and this January, according to Human Rights Watch, with Sarr, the lawyer, noting that spreading false news was one of the most common charges.

Successful elections have helped pause the country’s democratic backsliding. Last year, CIVICUS Monitor, a Johannesburg-based advocacy group, demoted the state of Senegal’s civil liberties from “obstructed to repressed,” placing it in the same category as Uganda, an East African nation that’s had the same leader for 38 years.

Senegal has about 300 radio stations, a dozen TV channels and twice as many daily newspapers, but public and most private media are under strong government influence, according to a report authored by Samba Dialimpa Badji, a PhD candidate at the department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, who researches disinformation in Africa.

“There’s a lot of evidence that laws are being used in a political way in Senegal,” Peter Cunliffe-Jones, a University of Westminster researcher who founded the fact-checking website Africa Check, said before the vote. “When you launch politically partisan attacks on information as being fake news, you’re undermining democracy.”

Tensions between Sall and his critics reached a breaking point last June when as many as 23 people were killed over four days of protests, adding to a death toll that Human Rights Watch previously estimated to be at least 37. In a press conference, the country’s police commissioner attempted to pin the violence on Pastef supporters with a video that purported to show an armed man confronting police. But an analysis by France 24 later found that the man was actually a police officer. A spokesperson for Senegal’s ministry of interior told France 24 at the time that the government supported the police version of events.

“The government itself had also been a source of disinformation,” said Badji.

Shortly after, authorities banned Pastef and began turning the internet off. Mobile-data blackouts were recorded last June, July, August and this February, when the election was originally scheduled to take place. These shutdowns — and a Tiktok ban — were aimed at curbing “hateful and subversive messages” by people “threatening to destabilize the country,” then-Minister of Communication, Telecommunication and the Digital Economy Moussa Bocar Thiam said in a statement. 

In response to all this, the resistance moved increasingly online. At one point, Pastef had more than one million Facebook followers in a country with about seven million registered voters. It also broadcast interviews on its own digital TV station, Jotna, which means “it’s high time” in Wolof.

The country’s youthfulness — its 18 million-strong population has a median age of 18 years old — helped the movement grow. But the shift online also opened a new avenue for censorship, one that ultimately landed Faye in jail.

“We’ve had to be extra vigilant,” Yassine Fall, Pastef’s vice-president for international affairs, said in a pre-election interview with Bloomberg. “We watch what we say and post on social media because so many of us have been incarcerated and we have to be careful not to go in there so we can continue the work.”

Just before the Feb. 25 election, Sall postponed the vote by another month. Even though he had abandoned the idea of seeking a third term, his ruling coalition was still facing a “more radical opposition,” Badji said. This was because authorities had already “eliminated the traditional opposition by sending them to prison or coopting them.” The crackdown also made them open to more radical change, he said.

While the run-up to the vote “hadn’t been very open,” Sall acknowledged in a March 19 interview with Bloomberg, he said that he had taken measures to ensure it was peaceful, such as pushing through an amnesty law to release detainees including Faye and Sonko. 

Still, out of 79 applicants, only 20 were ultimately given the constitutional court’s approval to run for the presidency. Faye was among them. 

When the election finally took place on March 24, Sall’s ruling Benno Bokk Yakaar coalition was voted out of power with 36% of the vote, while Faye, who ran as an independent after Pastef was banned, secured 54%. Upon taking office, Faye named Sonko prime minister, and appointed Fall as Senegal’s minister of foreign affairs.

Following opposition crackdowns and attempts to delay the vote by as much as ten months, the fact of the election felt like its own victory. On that cool Sunday morning, droves of young people woke up early to head to polling stations, and women in cotton boubous chatted as they went to cast ballots together.

The fake news-related arrests were one of the factors that mobilized support, according to Badji. “Many responded to the crackdown because it impacted them directly,” he said.

Sall’s heavy-handedness and Pastef’s targeting by authorities also made people curious, said Fall, the party official.  “People said look, I’m going to find out why this party is so hated. And when they came and saw how democratically it is organized, they joined.”

Another element was that, while Sall was an investor darling during his years in office, presiding over an average annual growth of about 5%, voters had lost faith that he was acting in the national interest.

“People questioned, at what cost did we have this economic growth, and to what extent it was actually benefiting the Senegalese?” Badji said.  

The protest movement didn’t only change formal politics in Senegal. The country’s society is conservative and largely Muslim, and the stifling of dissent also shifted mindsets around protest — and serving time in jail for it. The stigma of being imprisoned was once so great that families used to take inmates to the ocean upon their release for spiritual cleansing.

In the run-up to the vote, people would say “that going to jail as a prisoner of conscience is like going to Hajj,” said Fall, referring to the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. “Those who were given electronic ankle bracelets displayed them like a badge of honor instead of being ashamed.”

--With assistance from Jordan Robertson and Katarina Hoije.

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