Sputnik Africa reports credible and mostly positive information on Africa, while Western media constantly describe the continent in a negative way, Hafiz Basi from Sudan, Director of Youth Work at the Russian-African Club at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told Sputnik Africa on the sidelines of the All-Russian New Media Forum.
"Such new channels help us a lot to find out the truth about Africa. And this is very important, because Africa has many, many useful things. And, for example, there is much more positive news about Africa than negative. And when we watch, for example, Western channels, 80% of the coverage is about the negative, not the positive [side] about Africa," he said.
Basi added that the Russian people mostly know about Africa via Western media, as well as the African people know about Russia through the same information channel. He noted that Sputnik Africa is helping to spread the truth about Africa and Russia.
"First of all, as we see, Sputnik Africa, unlike, for example, such channels as BBC or CNN, Western TV channels, [Sputnik Africa] gives reliable information about Africa; they don’t just write [that] there are wars, there is famine, everything is bad," he stated.
Earlier, Priscilla Suchillia Best, a founder and a creative director of the Nigerian fashion brand Suchille, told Sputnik Africa on the sidelines of the All-Russian New Media Forum in Moscow that Sputnik reports authentic news and gives the world an opportunity to know more about Africa.
Following the outbreak of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine in 2022, a number of nations, mostly in the West, introduced the sanctions and outright bans on Russia-affiliated media. That year, the EU banned the international RT broadcaster and Sputnik as part of its efforts to establish the dominance of the pro-Ukrainian agenda in the information space.
On September 4 this year, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against RT broadcaster and several of its employees, as well as imposed further restrictions on Rossiya Segodnya, which is the parent media organization of Sputnik news agency, and its subsidiaries, designating them for the first time as "foreign missions."
Following this development, TikTok deleted several Sputnik accounts, including Sputnik Africa and its French edition, amid US accusations of election interference against Russian media.
In late October, Cameroonian politician Patient Parfait N'Dom told Sputnik Africa that Sputnik was ultimately banned in Europe and the US because it provides a perspective that differs from the Western narrative.