African Stream

African Stream
Industry	News media
Founded	September 2022 Kenya
Founder	Ahmed Kaballo
Defunct	July 2025

African Stream is a Kenya-based pan-Africanist media outlet. In 2024, it had over 900,000 follows on TikTok and 800,000 on Instagram before being censored for its anti-imperialist content. The founder and CEO of African Stream is Ahmed Kaballo. In response to the censorship and African Stream eventually having to shut down, Kaballo wrote "to bring us down, they had to resort to the centuries-old script that portrays any African who stands up against oppression as being sponsored by some third force out there" and stated, "in the next few years, hopefully there will be 20 or 30 different versions of African Stream".

Background

Writing in Tricontinental Pan-Africa in 2024, founder Kaballo explained that during the first seven years of being a broadcast journalist, he was frequently told that people "sadly don't care" about African news. Kaballo explained that he saw things differently, saying, "If you don’t consistently cover a region, your audience who might care will go elsewhere for updates" and that he was determined to disprove the notion that people don't care about African news. Kaballo also emphasized that he wanted to present news which provided needed context to news about Africa, explaining: "media exploring African stories without an anti-imperialist lens is not only missing the whole picture but also woefully lacking critical context [...] I set up African Stream to provide that crucial context."

Censorship

On 13 September 2024, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused African Stream of being controlled by Russia without giving any evidence. TikTok, Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), and the Alphabet-owned Gmail and YouTube then banned it.

African Stream continued operating despite this censorship, though by June 22, 2025 it announced that it would be closing the next month due to the censorship which had made African Stream unable to continue financially. The outlet posted a farewell message on Twitter in July of 2025.

A video posted on Kaballo's YouTube channel went into further details about the lead-up to Blinken's accusation and presented evidence of coordinated efforts to discredit and disparage African Stream:

Contrary to the widely held belief, the attacks on us did not start with Anthony Blinken's malicious and baseless accusations on 13th September 2024. Blinken's attack was merely an escalation of a well-orchestrated ploy against us that had been in the works for months. [...] By mid-2023, we had amassed over 1 million followers across all platforms. Between January and December 2023, about 10 million of you engaged with our content on Instagram and Facebook—an engagement rate higher than that of mainstream media outlets such as BBC Africa. This was a positive development, as it was a testament to the quality of our work, but it also put a mark on our backs.

Within months, it became clear that we had ruffled imperialists' feathers. The first attack came in June 2024, when the US-based National Broadcasting Company (NBC) accused us, without any evidence, of targeting Black communities with misinformation. [...] The NBC's attacks were soon followed by those from their brothers in imperialism, the Voice of America (VOA). [...] Less than a week after our response to the VOA, the puppet master, Blinken, finally came out to attack us directly, probably after realizing the shoddy job their cronies were doing.

[...] As this was unfolding, another attack targeted us, this time by the Stanford Internet Observatory. As usual, the article, authored by Stanford's Shelby Grossman and David Thiel, did not give any substantive evidence but merely parroted Blinken's claims. Strangely, in their analysis, Grossman and Thiel used YouTube numbers from a few days before Blinken's announcement, meaning they were aware of Blinken's plan before he made it public—a sign of a well-coordinated ploy against us.

Kaballo, speaking to MintPress News, explained that African Stream's growing following among Black people in the US, combined with African Stream's criticism of both US Republicans and Democrats is likely what triggered the accusations by the US State Department, saying, "We followed the pan-African tradition of Malcolm X, who said that there is no difference between the fox and the wolf, you get bitten either way. And because we had so much influence on the Black community in the U.S., we were seen to be a threat to the Democratic Party. That’s why we feel like it was a partisan attack." Kaballo also stated that the attacks were no surprise, but that "the surprise was that big tech, with no evidence whatsoever, decided to take us down."

Journalist Alan MacLeod wrote regarding the censorship and eventual closure of African Stream and other independent, anti-imperialist news organizations, commenting that "the African Stream story highlights the sorry state of global communications, where the United States has the power to choke, and even simply delete, media outlets that stand for an alternative vision of the world. Washington both funds thousands of journalists around the planet to produce pro-U.S. propaganda, and, through its close connections to Silicon Valley, has the power to destroy those that do not toe the line."