The EU Has Spent Over a Million Euros Fighting Online Hate Speech in South Sudan, Where Almost Nobody Has Internet Access

NGOs are a lot of things. One of the things that they are, is blindingly, mind-numbingly, profoundly idiotic. Our native European NGOs are bad enough, but we also spend untold millions funding absurd carbon-copies of these NGOs in other countries, and they are even stupider. It beggars belief.

Today, NiUS reports the amazing boondoggle that is Defy Hate Now, or rather, #defyhatenow, because most of the stupidest NGOs and their subsidiary projects have to stylise their names in absurd ways. #defyhatenow is an anti-hate-speech project in South Sudan “that works on providing community-based and data-driven solutions to the problem of hate speech, disinformation and countering online incitement to violence.” All of this in a country where only 12% of the population even has an internet connection.

The South Sudanese Hate Defiers have received 1.2 million Euros from the European Union since 2020, and a cool million since 2023. The money flows through the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, or the NDICI, which is the main fund the EU maintains for funnelling millions of Euros to Africa for reasons nobody can understand. Before the EU awarded grants to #defyhatenow, the German Foreign Office was their main source of funding, which means that German taxpayers have been paying to combat internet hate speech and social media disinformation in a region where almost nobody is even online for a whole decade now.

It’s not totally clear what Defy Hate Now has used all of this money for. They claim to provide “(social) media literacy trainings,” “community level facilitation of hate speech and conflict mitigation activities” and “community-based and data-driven solutions to the problem of hate speech, disinformation and misinformation.” Among the sparse materials available on their website, we find this photograph of our Hate Defiers posing with an incorrectly realised cardboard cutout of a hashtag, I guess at one of their (social) media literacy trainings.

I suspect that these trainings, facilitations and solutions are mainly a publicity distraction, and that the Hate Defiers have in fact pissed away most of their one-million-Euro grant on a strange website called 211 Check, which provides “fact-checking and information verification in South Sudan.” 211 Check employs a whopping six people, including a “Team Lead,” an “Editor” and with that kind of managerial overhead four surely over-supervised “fact-checkers,” some of whom double as “media monitors.” Judging from the extremely sparse output of 211 Check (their last piece was published a month ago) there are precious few facts to check in South Sudan. There are also precious few readers, if social media is any clue. 211 Check have racked up an astounding 226 subscribers on YouTube, 245 on Instagram and 1,405 on Twitter, where their posts routinely go entirely ignored. Their only meaningful presence is on Facebook, where their 7,100 followers occasionally drop a thumbs-up or two on a post. Only very rarely, however, do the number of Facebook interactions exceed the number of staff employed by 211 Check.

Defy Hate Now was allegedly founded by a South Sudanese feminist and fully mobbed-up NGO factotum named Marina Modi. Back in the days of Foreign Office funding, German state media ran a short piece on her group, which is the most publicity this shadowy money sink has ever received. There you can see Modi rambling into the camera about “hate” while sitting in front of a presentation board bearing a frenetically sketched “PYRAMID of HATE,” which illustrates how “BIAS” leads to “INDIVIDUAL ACTS OF PREJUDICE” which in turn cause “DISCRIMINATION” which causes “(bias motivated) VIOLENCE,” all of which finally erupts in a darkly purple “GENOCIDE” squeezed awkwardly into the pyramidion.

Imagine hailing from a country that has known protracted civil war and all manner of ethnic violence, and then being fed this naive Western drivel about bias and discrimination. It is no wonder that nobody in South Sudan gives the slightest shit about #defyhatenow.

While Modi claims to have founded #defyhatenow, it’s actually just a project of an equally if not more bizarre Berlin-based NGO that calls itself the “r0g_agency for open culture and critical transformation.” The r0g_agency was founded by two lunatics named Susanne Bellinghausen (an “architect and interaction designer” of uncertain nationality) and Stephen Kovats (a Canadian “cultural and media researcher with a background in architecture and urbanism”) in 2013.

They aim “to combine on the ground work with open source methodologies in order to foster innovation and address structural problems in Juba, the new capital of the newly formed South Sudan,” and they are funded mostly by the German Foreign Office and our Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Alongside #defyhatenow, they run a few other hashtag projects, inlcuding #YoMIL, which promotes “the inclusion of young women in the media sector in The Gambia,” and – far more egregiously – #migrant media network. The latter is dedicated to informing Africans about how to migrate to Western countries like Germany, and the only good thing to say about them is that their “Smart Migration Guides” are so vague and platitudinous as to be totally worthless.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.