Paper short abstract:

The Anglophone crisis which erupted in Cameroon in 2016 and metamorphosed into a full blown war in 1917 saw the internet appropriated by youths whom I prefer to call them “Virtual Presidents.”

Paper long abstract:

Media and power can be likened to intimate strangers. This is not strange to Africa. Africa has been befuddled by conflicts of all sorts at the dawn of 21st Century. These conflicts have made use of social media in ways that were never intended by those who created the social media. The Anglophone crisis which erupted in Cameroon in 2016 and metamorphosed into a full blown war in 1917 saw the internet appropriated by youths whom I prefer to call them “Virtual Presidents.” These new types of warlords, who were living in the diaspora (United States, Europe and South Africa) used the internet, Twitters and WhatsApp to control some of the people on the ground. They gave instructions such as no schools, ghost towns, kill and kidnapped to their soldiers on the ground and the instructions were obeyed to the latter. Although this war met with resistance from the incumbent power brokers who saw the diaspora youths as digital dissidents, it showed in a way that those who teleguided the war from the diaspora by use of social media had become presidents in their own right. This paper questions who are these faces behind the masks? In other words who are these virtual presidents? What are their backgrounds how do they manipulate the population on the ground? What are the networks which they have created? What are the reasons that explains their actions?.