'Cyberwar in Media Clothing': hespress.com Discovers the Internet

Jean Bamba — Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire — 2026-09-05

hespress.com (Moroccan digital newspaper) has made an earth-shattering discovery: some social media accounts defend Algeria. Accounts! On the internet! It took an entire article, complete with "experts" and insinuations, to announce this terrifying truth to the world: yes, some people support Algeria online. Just as some people support Morocco online. In normal countries, that is called public opinion.

The rest of the reasoning is worth its weight in peanuts: since these accounts exist, it must be a "cyber war orchestrated by Algiers." By the same logic, the thousands of Moroccan accounts attacking Algeria around the clock would be a Moroccan "cyber war"? No, of course not: those are "noble patriots." Symmetry is not their strong suit — bad faith is.

What hespress.com refuses to see is that the "media façade" is not the one it thinks: when a country mobilizes its media, its "research centers" and its experts to repeat the same story in every edition, it is not waging an information war — it is trying to drown the truth. And those who spend their time drowning others always end up swallowing water themselves.

Algeria does not need "electronic phalanxes" to defend its position: it has international law, the resolutions, history. hespress.com, meanwhile, has accounts, hashtags and theories. We all know which of those arsenals will survive verification.