MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Deputy Prime Minister Jibril Abdirashid Abdi told the opening of a two day federal communication forum on Monday 7 September that Somalis should be required to use the identity number issued by the National Identification and Registration Authority when they open a social media account, and he asked the Ministry of Information to write that requirement into the media regulations the government is now drafting. Information Minister Abdulfatah Qasim Mohamud used the same platform to announce guidelines that would oblige video and information produced about Somalia to align with the country’s culture, its security and its national interests. Al-Shabaab furnished the justification, with the deputy prime minister describing militant accounts taken down and reopened under fresh names within days. An investigation published a week earlier records what the Ministry of Information has already been doing to Somali journalists without any of these powers.
The Ministry of Information Sets Out Its Framework
The Second Somali Strategic Communication Forum ran in Mogadishu across 7 and 8 September under the theme “Shaping the Future of Somalia’s Media in the Digital Era”, and it gathered federal institutions, the federal member states, the Banadir Regional Administration, media organisations, international partners, academics, civil society and the social media influencers the organisers listed among their invited stakeholders. Abdulfatah Qasim Mohamud closed the proceedings on Tuesday evening with a commitment to modernise the sector, strengthen government communications and build what he called a credible and trusted information environment. He thanked the United Nations Transitional Assistance Mission in Somalia for the support it gave to organising the two days.
A separate inter ministerial session brought the information ministries of the federal government, the member states and the Banadir administration into one room to advance the National Communication Strategy and to improve what the closing statement called the coherence of key government messages. Nur Sidow Baba, the Southwest State minister of information and public awareness, spoke on behalf of the member states and asked for closer cooperation against the risks posed by misinformation and disinformation. Southwest is the state whose elected president Mogadishu removed by force in March before installing a replacement through a managed vote in June.
Colonel Hassan Ali Nur Shuute, chairman of the Armed Forces Court of First Instance, attended the closing session and told it that countering misinformation, disinformation and narratives that fuel division within society is a national priority requiring coordinated action and collective responsibility. The agenda across the two days covered emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, journalistic ethics and the role of strategic communication in liberation efforts, stabilisation and peacebuilding. The Ministry of Information will now compile the proceedings into an outcomes report and a follow up framework covering government communication coordination and cooperation with the international partners that fund Somali media development.
What the Takedowns Have Already Removed
Sahal Cable TV, a Puntland broadcaster, posted footage of a school graduation and a food distribution on 28 February and watched the videos vanish from its Facebook page after a copyright claim the station says was fabricated. It was one of dozens documented across the eight months before the Ministry of Information convened its forum. A clip of President Said Abdullahi Deni speaking disappeared in the same manner days later. A Bangladeshi WhatsApp number then messaged the station manager Jabir Isse to claim responsibility, sent him a link to a third video with the instruction “Now this one remove”, and reported back “Done removed” less than a minute afterwards. The same number demanded fifteen hundred dollars to stop, and Isse refused to pay and reported the exchange to Facebook.
SBC Somali TV lost a set of street interviews about Somaliland on 9 January, notified by Facebook that the material amounted to incitement, and the appeal describing the content as ordinary journalistic reporting from the streets of Bosaso never brought it back. On 15 July, after the station published a press conference in which President Said Abdullahi Deni denounced federal interference in Puntland, Facebook blocked the reel worldwide over a claim filed by an account calling itself Lucifer Andras, and the page took a warning strike for its trouble. The state owned Puntland broadcaster lost a recording of the same speech.
Gaylan Media, which reaches more than a million followers, absorbed roughly twenty two claims between late June and early August, beginning with its coverage of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s visit to Djibouti on 29 June and continuing through a report titled “Villa Somalia’s war on Puntland, the previous failure and the new attempt”. Those claims arrived through Rights Manager accounts in the names Devid A. Donald Alkomer and Eitan Yosef Cohen, neither of which corresponds to any traceable page.
Himilo Media took thirteen claims in a single week from an entity styling itself Quiz.com, covering a Mogadishu elders’ meeting, the Galmudug election dispute, a Puntland security operation and a report on prostate cancer. One of its editors said the outlet had earlier received a telephone call from someone at the Ministry of Information advising it to take action on its Facebook page. The page was later removed from Meta Business Suite altogether.
A Penal Code Waiting on a Chamber Whose Term Has Run Out
The draft penal code the Council of Ministers approved in December 2025 now sits before the House of the People as a replacement for legislation more than sixty years old, presented as a modernisation that captures cybercrime and economic offences. Article 144 lowers the penalty for attacking the honour or the dignity of the president from three years to one. Insult or defamation aimed at public officials or state institutions carries up to five years, insulting the country or its symbols carries three to seven years and a fine reaching seven thousand dollars, and recording or circulating images without a permit, an authorisation or consent carries five years and five thousand.
Economic sabotage enters the bill as any conduct likely to harm the national economy and draws five to ten years in prison. Information deemed false, misleading or exaggerated draws up to ten years when the country is at war and up to twenty when a hostile state is judged to be involved, and Somalia has been at war throughout the life of the chamber that will vote on the text. Criminal defamation survives the reform and reaches digital publication for the first time, with fines running from three hundred to a thousand dollars. Omar Faruk Osman, secretary general of the national union of Somali journalists, said the provisions risk encouraging censorship and self censorship and were drafted without any meaningful consultation.
The chamber that will decide the bill is a House of the People whose own mandate has expired and whose speaker was elected after the term of its members ran out. The president who would gain the protection of Article 144 governs under amendments that extended his term by a year and pulled executive power toward the palace. A legislature without a mandate is being asked to define which sentences are crimes, at the request of a government whose legitimacy several of its own member states now reject outright. Whatever guidelines the Ministry of Information writes after its forum would be enforced through this code once that chamber passes it.
Who the Ministry of Information Has Been Pointing At
A former employee of the Ministry of Information told the journalists’ syndicate that the police and the National Intelligence and Security Agency forwarded the names of reporters and copies of critical content to the ministry and to the National Communications Authority, and that the ministry’s director of social media and officials of the authority then approached Facebook for removals on community standards grounds. Abdishakur Ali Ahmed, appointed to run that department in December 2021, confirmed that it was reorganised around the National Communication Strategy and that its mandate now includes engagement with Meta. He denied ever requesting the removal of journalism and declined to produce the correspondence. The authority’s director did not answer written questions, and Meta did not reply.
Every documented claim landed on material the federal government would have preferred unseen, including the Puntland presidency’s own press conferences, the Southwest election dispute of February, the opposition protests that filled Mogadishu in May and June, a NISA officer filmed assaulting a civilian, and forced evictions at Tarabuunka. Police announced the arrest of ten social media influencers on 28 June over what they called indecent behaviour, and the force’s spokesman said separately that officers had contacted Facebook to take down content and close pages. Al-Shabaab, the justification offered from the podium at the Mogadishu forum, appears nowhere in the documented record. Garowe meanwhile treats every agreement with Mogadishu as annulled, and the broadcasters carrying President Said Abdullahi Deni to Puntland audiences are the ones losing their reach.
Mascuud Warsame, who founded Xogbile Media, was seized by intelligence officers on Maka Al-Mukarama Avenue on 30 June and held for thirty nine days without charge, without access to his family and without a lawyer. He says he now avoids anything critical of the government. A reporter shot twice in the back by uniformed men in Baidoa on 3 September died of his wounds four days later, and no arrest has been announced. The identity number the deputy prime minister wants attached to every account is the same number the registration authority is building into the roll for the vote this government promises to hold. The Ministry of Information would keep the register of who may speak while the same administration keeps the register of who may vote.
