Who funds Algeria’s independent media?
As revenue streams dry up, a number of media sites are promoting a telecom giant owned by Qatar
A series of media laws instituted by Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune since he took office in late 2019 have crippled the country’s already fragile independent media sector by making most forms of digital advertising — except those which can be controlled by the state — illegal.
In this investigation, TruthAfrica analyses Algeria’s current independent media ecosystem through the lens of a web development company, Ultra Digital, that has gained numerous high-profile digital media contracts in the Tebboune era. Unsurprisingly, we show the company’s portfolio, which contains some of the biggest media names in Algeria, is filled with duplicated content that is unabashedly supportive of Tebboune and his administration’s corporate interests.
Most of these websites — especially those that have no ostensible source of income — appear increasingly fixated on a telecom giant named Ooredoo, which is majority owned by the Qatari state and overseen by members of its royal family (e.g. the chairman of the board of directors). Ooredoo did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the possibility that they were funding these media outlets. Ultra Digital did not respond to our request for comment about the nature of services they provide.
TruthAfrica reports that Ooredoo’s significant influence over Algeria’s allegedly independent media is occurring, by all appearances, with the blessing of the current Algerian government. The end result of this influence, we show, provides a stark view of what happens when an independent press is effectively captured by the state and its corporate allies — a process familiar to Algeria’s North African neighbours and also some European nations including Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Ennahar Group — the canary in a coalmine
Tebboune took office in 2019. A long-serving politician, his rise to power came as a result of the Hirak movement, which opposed a possible fifth term of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika due to his age and alleged corruption. Algerian press freedom has long been a largely fictional concept, but Tebboune’s rule has been especially harsh towards independent journalists.
According to a 2025 report by the international press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF): ‘the media landscape in Algeria has never been so deteriorated’. Their report explained that ‘independent media are under pressure, journalists are often jailed and prosecuted, and several websites are blocked’.
One of the most glaring victims of this pressure has been Ennahar Group, a private media group owned by Anis Rahmani. In addition to a TV station, Ennahar Group includes the website Ennahar Online, one of the largest online news sources in the country.
As reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), another press watchdog, Rahmani, whose real name is Mohamed Mokaddem, had been the ally of the previous president, Bouteflika, and had been critical of the Hirak movement that brought current president, Tebboune, to power.
Two months into his presidency, Tebboune’s government began charging Rahmani with offences against the state and its military. After years of prosecutions, convictions, and appeals, Rahmani was sentenced to a draconian 10 years in prison, where he remains to this day. In late 2024, representatives from CPJ were unable to confirm his condition or receive any information about his detention. Still a major media outlet in Algeria, Ennahar Online is now unabashedly pro-Tebboune.
Following Rahmani’s imprisonment, the Algerian state has reportedly engaged in a campaign to take ownership of Ennahar Group’s media properties entirely — something the government and Ennahar deny. In a December 2024 report, African Intelligence, a pan-African media outlet focused primarily on business intelligence, reported that the Algerian government was ‘keen to take control of Arabic language television channel Ennahar TV’.
In late 2024, according to African Intelligence’s sources, ‘a court bailiff accompanied by a police escort visited [Ennahar’s] headquarters on the hillside of Algiers to inform the management’ of a court decision ruling that Ennahar Group’s assets were to be seized by the state. The property could be absorbed into existing state-owned media properties, they reported. Ennahar’s present leadership denies these allegations, and TruthAfrica has not independently confirmed them.
What is plain to see, TruthAfrica reports, is that Ennahar Group’s online news site, once a bastion of anti-Tebboune sentiment, has transformed itself into an unabashed cheerleader for his government’s every move. As this TruthAfrica investigation shows, this phenomenon is not limited to Ennahar’s content, but to nearly all allegedly ‘independent’ media in Algeria.
Further, the state does not appear to be the only player in this homogenisation. TruthAfrica shows that this process increasingly appears to be influenced by a Qatari telecommunication giant named Ooredoo.
Snapshot of independent media and the rise of Ultra Digital
In 2023, Tebboune’s government passed a series of laws further regulating independent media. One such law included the creation of an ‘independent’ ethics board to oversee the print and digital publishing industry. By law, according to MENA Rights, a human rights watchdog, half of the members of this ‘High Council of Ethics and Professional Conduct for the journalism profession are directly appointed by the President of the Republic’.
Another law stipulated that Algerian media companies must be owned, with few exceptions, solely by Algerian citizens and, further, that they cannot receive funding that is not Algerian in origin. As a result, independent media outlets must rely on either advertising money from state-owned businesses, which are doled out by a state-run group known as the National Communication, Publishing and Advertising Company (ANEP), or from private companies in good standing with the regime.
ANEP is a government agency that advertises in print or broadcast media on behalf of state-run initiatives, interests, or companies. Media outlets must be approved by Tebboune loyalists to receive this quite limited source of funding. Outlets that have received recent funding from ANEP generally post a badge indicating their receipt of this source of funding. Tebboune has taken more direct control of the group since taking office, placing it under the auspices of the Ministry of Communication.
As RSF explains in their 2025 summary of the country: ‘The private sector has been hit hard since 2019, with many media outlets, including TV channels, forced to shut down, above all because advertising has dried up. In addition, government subsidies are granted only to state-owned media or to privately owned media outlets that support the government.’
Seemingly in concert with this decline in financial support, TruthAfrica reports, a digital marketing and web development company named Ultra Digital has thrived. Since 2021, it has entered into contracts with a significant number of government-approved (i.e. those recognised by the state as legal) ‘independent’ media websites presently operating in Algeria.
The company is relevant to this investigation because they provide web services for Ennahar Online. The company redesigned Enahar’s website in June 2021 following Rahmani’s arrest. Ultra Digital may merely be a successful company making the most of the present Algerian media climate, but the depth and nature of their clients suggest that Ultra Digital could have undisclosed ties to the state or to corporations.
Ultra Digital also works with politically important entities such as the Algerian political party the National Liberation Front (FLN), which endorsed Tebboune in the 2024 presidential election, the football club MC Alger, owned by the Algerian state-owned petroleum company Sonatrach, and the Algerian website for the private Chinese company Geely Automotive — a significant supplier of cars in Algeria.
It is unclear who owns or runs Ultra Digital. The company was apparently founded as DZADWEB [Dzayer is the arabic name for Algeria, and .dz is top level domain assigned to Algerian websites] in early 2020 by an Algerian citizen who had worked for the Algerian media outlet Al-Shorouk — which was once an Ultra Digital client. TruthAfrica is withholding his name as he appears to have left his company, and country, prior to gaining these contracts.
On 15 June 2025, via LinkedIn messenger, that person told TruthAfrica that he sold the company and now lives in Canada. He would not tell us to whom he sold it or who currently owns it. ‘I do not own anything, and have no contact,’ he said. After our conversation, he deleted any mention of the company from his profile. A message to Ultra Digital’s support email itself went unanswered as well.
The reality — homogenised content with no business model
In collaboration with Code For Africa, and as a way to study the Algerian independent media ecosystem more broadly, TruthAfrica identified 24 allegedly independent media companies who make use of Ultra Digital’s services. We then analysed, among other things, the ads that appeared on these sites between 28 August 2025 and 02 September 2025.
The content published on websites in this dataset, whose editorial content has been monitored by Truth Africa since May 2025, betrays a homogenised and toothless media that is far from independent in voice, publishing the same pro-state or corporate content across multiple platforms.
The most salient observation of Ultra Digital’s portfolio, as a whole, is that much of the material on each of the sites is duplicated, and primarily consists of a repetition of state media press releases. It is littered with praise for the current regime’s actions.
An especially apt illustration of both the homogeneity and obsequiousness of these outlets occurred in early July 2025 (shown below), when several Algerian media outlets reported favourably on an opinion piece written by Algeria’s minister of communication, Mohamed Meziane, praising the righteousness of the restrictive media laws Tebboune put in place.
That story, originally published by the state-owned Algerian Press Service, appeared in some form on at least four different Ultra Digital websites:
In the piece, Meziane argued that these laws would provide Algeria with a ‘unified media front’ and serve as a ‘bulwark against all attempts at collusion and hatred targeting Algeria through foreign media outlets and social media, as well as paid mouthpieces and dark newsrooms’.
In data collected by TruthAfrica between 28 August and 02 September 2025, only two websites Sabq Press and Tariq News had active ANEP advertising campaigns during this window of time, and only two other websites, Internews and El Ikhbaria contained an ad from private companies.
Ten of the 24 websites in TruthAfrica’s dataset are not currently receiving funds from ANEP, have no ads of any kind, or display blank ads. In addition to Ennahar Online, who did not respond, TruthAfrica reached out to six clients of Ultra Digital with blank advertising space. Only one, Tadamsa News, responded with any substance. Shihab Presse, Bladi Info, Al-Hiwar, and Dzair Tube did not respond to our request for comment.
Djalal Louze, Tadamsa’s manager, told us that several factors make funding challenging. ‘The main one is that private advertisers tend to avoid digital media, and the advertising market from private companies is extremely limited,’ Louze said. ‘As for advertising from public companies,’ he added, referring to ANEP, ‘we have not received any campaigns from them since our newspaper was founded in 2021.’
It is unclear if programmatic advertising like Google Ads run afoul of Algeria’s new media laws regarding foreign money, but only three outlets appear to be using this most common form of advertising as a source of funding. At least eight of the outlets analysed by TruthAfrica, including Tadamsa News, Ennahar Online, and the aforementioned sites with blank ads, have no apparent source of funding whatsoever. As TruthAfrica shows below, one plausible hypothesis is that they are being funded by an entity that receives positive coverage as a return on their investment.
Algerian media’s new obsession — Ooredoo
What these apparently revenue-deficient outlets do have, in spades, are positive stories about a telecom company named Ooredoo. While Ooredoo’s ‘corporate responsibility’ initiatives have long engaged with the Algerian journalism world via seminars and journalism awards, their presence in the Ultra Digital portfolio is as conspicuous as it is obsequious:
Eighteen of the 24 Ultra Digital websites analysed in the aforementioned time period by TruthAfrica contained what could be called ‘pro-Ooredoo’ content. The websites that appeared to lack this content entirely were usually the websites of private Algerian TV News outlets, which have access to a different pool of state or private funding to draw from, or from outlets that have obtained past ANEP funding.
Given their long documented presence in the Algerian journalism space as well as the ingratiating coverage their company receives across the board in digital media outlets that lack any apparent business model, it is fair to ask if Ooredoo’s influence extends to directly funding these independent journalism websites — either for their benefit, the state’s benefit, or both. Much of the positive Ooredoo content re-enforces patriotic narratives consistent with state messaging:
Many of these stories are effective or literal copies of press releases from Ooredoo Algeria’s website. TruthAfrica asked Louze if Ooredoo was a significant source of income for Tadamsa News. Louze, whose email signature lauds his outlet’s receipt of a journalism award given by Ooredoo, did not respond to any Ooredoo-related questions.
TruthAfrica also reached out to seven other ‘pro-Ooredoo’ outlets, including Ennahar Online, to ask if Ooredoo paid for positive coverage in some way. With the exception of an unnamed individual from Algeria Scoop, who responded on 22 August 2025 with a terse ‘your sister’ as their only reply, none of these outlets responded either.
By email, TruthAfrica reached out to the Ooredoo press office and representatives of Ooredoo Algeria multiple times — on 24 August 2025 and 09 September 2025 — to ask, among other things, if they funded independent media in Algeria in exchange for undisclosed positive Ooredoo placements on their sites. They did not respond to these requests for comment.
Ooredoo and Tebboune — an alliance?
Ultra Digital’s services, Truth Africa shows here, have been used to create markedly pro-state and pro-Ooredoo media. The developer may have no direct ties to any corporate or state entity in Algeria, but their success, at the very least, is indicative of the type of journalism ecosystem Algeria’s media laws have created — a slew of effectively identical media outlets that do not criticise any actions of the state and instead promote the state’s interests.
Ooredoo’s omnipresence on these sites is, at first glance, counter-intuitive. Ooredoo competes with two Algerian companies, one of which is owned by the state. Their relationship with the Tebboune administration had a rocky start, as well. In February 2020, his security service arrested and swiftly deported the then-CEO of Ooredoo Algeria for alleged efforts to fire 900 employees despite a period of high profits.
Since then, the company has evidently mended its relationship with the state. The state seems to have let them invest themselves aggressively within what remains of Algerian independent media, and in June 2025, Ooredoo received a lucrative licence to operate 5G in Algeria. From a geopolitical perspective, this makes sense. A positive relationship with Ooredoo is important to Algeria’s foreign relations, as Qatar is the single largest Arab investor in their country.
By helping to prop up the Algerian regime, Ooredoo is advancing its own interests as well. Algeria represents a large and growing market of almost 47 million people, especially now that they have received a licence to operate one of the first 5G networks in the country. A continuous stream of advertising in the digital advertising space about their products and how great the company is would also seem to help their bottom line.
If Ooredoo is tacitly funding independent media in Algeria, something that appears plausible but not conclusive based on this investigation, such an effort appears to have the support of the state, as their ubiquity would not be possible without it. In March 2024, a former Ooredoo Algeria director, Messaoud Alghem, was appointed by Tebboune to lead ANEP. We asked Alghem if he still had any present association with Ooredoo or if his past association with Ooredoo presented a conflict. He did not respond to our request for comment.
What is clear from this investigation, however, is that as revenue sources for independent media have dried up and as critical voices have been silenced, Ooredoo has aggressively immersed itself at the forefront of a Tebboune-friendly ‘independent’ Algerian media. This may have provided benefits to both Tebboune and the Qatari-owned giant, but the arrangement has done nothing to create anything more than the illusion of Algerian press freedom.
This article was written by Alex Kasprak, freelance journalist working with Pravda Association, and edited by senior editor Eva Vajda.