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In the days leading up to the 2026 World Cup opener between Ghana and Panama in Canada, a Facebook page, Ghana Today, posted a video of Ghana’s Chief Justice, Baffoe Bonnie, reportedly arriving in Canada with Ghana’s Vice President, Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, as a member of her staff.
The video, posted on June 16, was captioned, “Chief Justice Baffoe Bonnie flies to Canada to watch Ghana’s opening match as staff at the office of the Vice President.”
As of Sept. 14, 2026, the video had drawn over 92,000 views, received more than 700 reactions, had close to 150 comments, and gained 42 reshares.
In the comment section, some Facebook users quickly turned it into a political narrative.
“CJ flirting with the executive. If this happened in Nana Addo’s tenure, there would have been an earthquake,” a Facebook user, Charles Addei, wrote.
“Ei NDC, hmm. Interesting days ahead,” another Facebook user, Papa Kofi Agyei, commented.
Three days later, on June 19, 2026, the Judicial Service issued a statement (see here and here) contradicting the claim. It stated that the Chief Justice’s trip was not funded by the Office of the Vice President.
DUBAWA found no publicly available evidence supporting Ghana Today’s claim that the Chief Justice travelled as a staff member of the Vice President’s office.
This was not an isolated case. On Aug. 11, 2026, another Ghana Today Facebook page with 45,000 followers claimed that the Auditor-General shared a forensic audit that uncovered payments to certain individuals, including Kofi Tonto.
Kofi is a well-known New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporter popularly associated with Ghana’s former Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia’s team.
The post’s caption read, “God is the only Christian! Kofi shouts as party mafias give him a paltry $800 out of about $16,000 loot…”
We ran an advanced keyword search to verify the claim and found no public statement from Kofi complaining about the $800 figure, contrary to what the post suggested. Kofi also denied receiving money linked to a fraudulent scheme from Ghana’s embassy in Washington.
In a months-long investigation, DUBAWA found two Facebook pages with the same name and logo, running the same playbook for opposite political parties. They present themselves as independent news sources while publishing selectively edited, fabricated, or out-of-context content to favour their respective camps.
Who is behind the pages?
Neither page discloses a real newsroom, editor, or publisher. To establish the mastermind behind both pages, DUBAWA examined each page’s history using Facebook’s Transparency and Reviews sections.
The 65,000-follower page [archived here] began as “Ministry of Education,” created on Dec. 17, 2017, under the Akufo-Addo-led administration and renamed “Ministry of Education Ghana” the next day. It became “NPP TV” on Feb. 2, 2023, and only took the name “Ghana Today” on March 17, 2025.
Screenshot of Ghana Today’s page information.
DUBAWA also scanned the page’s review section. A review from Mark Sandew on Sept. 13, 2018, referenced a school-focused post. Another, from Oct. 6, 2018, references SHS education policy and is consistent with the page’s identity as “Ministry of Education – Ghana” at the time.
No further reviews appear until March 20, 2025, three days after the rebrand to Ghana Today, when a user, Baglinaa Simani, wrote, “They’re a disinformation agency.” Dozens of reviews have followed.
DUBAWA documented engagements of some notable NPP members and supporters.
Tabitha Apegyine Ayillah, an NPP member and spokesperson for Mahamudu’s Education Policy Committee, downloaded and shared a ‘newscard’ published by the pro-NPP Ghana Today page ridiculing the Chief Justice for attending the funeral of the wife of NPP stalwart, Peter Mac Manu.
DUBAWA documented here [archived here], here [archived here] and here [archived here] the online interactions made by the former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP) and one-time parliamentary candidate for Asante Akyem Central, Kofi Nkansah, with the page.
We also documented here [archived here], here [archived here], and here [archived here] an NPP supporter and academic, Frank Bannor’s engagements with the page.
Image showing interactions with the page
The 45,000-follower page [archived here] shows a similar arc. It was created Sept. 22, 2018 and adopted the name “Feed Ghana Initiative.”
It resurfaced briefly in September 2023 and became dormant again. On March 14, 2026, it was renamed “Ghana Today” and relaunched with a new profile picture, cover image and a flyer announcing its identity as a news platform.
A post about Dennis Aboagye was the first “newscard” shared after the relaunch. The post claimed that despite the National Democratic Congress (NDC)’s economic gains, Ghanaians will miss the NPP, who are committed to a Bawumia victory. On the newscard, he was identified as the NPP’s Communication Director, a position he was not holding at the time and is not holding at the time of writing this article.
While DUBAWA could not independently confirm the identities of the administrators behind the page, Facebook says three of the administrators are in Ghana.
Screenshot of Ghana Today’s page information.
Some Facebook users praised the page for its “authentic news” (see here, here, here, and here). Others labelled it as a “disinformation mill” (see here, here, here, and here), mirroring the pattern on the pro-NPP page.
A Facebook account, Hogba Ernest, stood out in the reviews by actively responding to other users (see here, here, here, here, and here).
Notable persons affiliated with the NDC have been documented engaging with posts of the pro-NDC Ghana Today page. They include Nuong Falong, Head, Information and Public Affairs, Permanent Mission of Ghana to the United Nations.
The Director for Research and Information at NEIP, Casper Kampoli, has also reacted to posts on the page.
Additionally, social media Snr Senor Mikdad interacted with posts from the page.
The Ashanti Regional Minister also commented on one of the posts the page shared. Aide to Ghana GoldBod CEO, Sammy Gyamfi, Annan Arhin Perry, has also interacted with a post on the pro-NDC page.
Additionally, the CEO of the Ghana Digital Centres Limited, Dzifa Gunu, commented on a post that mocked NPP stalwart, Mustapha Hamid.
News used as political attacks
The pattern extends well beyond the Chief Justice video. On Aug. 11, 2026, the pro-NPP Ghana Today page published a newscard claiming domestic tourism in Ghana had declined from 19 per cent in 2024 to seven per cent in 2025.
The claim doesn’t hold up. The Ghana Today page framed the shift from 19 per cent to 7 per cent as domestic tourism “declining.” But both figures are year-on-year growth rates, not visitor counts. Additionally, a slower growth rate is not the same as a fall in tourism numbers. According to the Ghana Tourism Authority’s 2024 Tourism Report, domestic visits to tourist sites rose 19 per cent that year, from 1.41 million in 2023 to 1.68 million in 2024.
In a video address, Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts Minister Dzifa Gomashie said domestic tourism grew a further 7 per cent in 2025, from 1.68 million visits to roughly 1.7 million. In other words, both years saw more Ghanaians visiting tourist sites than the year before. The sector simply grew at a slower pace in 2025 than it had in 2024. Presenting that slowdown as a “decline from 19% to 7%” inverts what the numbers show: two consecutive years of expansion, not a drop-off in domestic tourism.
A second post from the same page attributed a quote to Abigail Aboagye, widow of Samuel Aboagye, claiming she said her husband’s death “was a waste because Galamsey has gotten worse.”
Samuel Aboagye was one of eight Ghanaians who died on Aug. 6, 2025, after a Ghana Air Force Harbin Z-9 military helicopter tragically crashed in the Adansi Akrofuom area near Obuasi while on an anti-illegal mining assignment.
Only half the quote checks out. Abigail did describe the land as still bleeding and rivers still being poisoned. But Ghanaian outlet Adomonline‘s own record of her remarks contains no statement calling her husband’s death “a waste.” DUBAWA found no evidence she ever said it.
The pro-NDC Ghana Today page runs the same play from the opposite bench. On Aug. 5, 2026, it captioned a post, “We have lost all our intellectuals, and our youth are following blindly,” attributed to Mustapha Hamid, First National Vice Chairman aspirant for the NPP.
DUBAWA could not find any comment disagreeing with or calling out the post for its inaccurate content.
Our review of his actual interview on Kesseben FM found no such framing. Hamid had argued that the NPP needed to rebuild its intellectual base and reclaim its historical pull on the country’s brightest minds. Also, he said the NDC currently holds that advantage, which should be a call to action, not a lament. He named no individuals, did not reference anyone, and did not call any young supporters “dimwits.”
A day earlier, the same page had published a claim that GH¢104 million sits in five frozen accounts belonging to Dennis Aboagye, asking how a “sacked DCE” accumulated such a sum in four years.
The underlying facts are real only in part. The Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) is investigating Dennis over alleged financial irregularities of roughly GH¢55 million during his time at the IMCCoD Secretariat. A High Court has also frozen five of his accounts. But no public record has confirmed that GH¢104 million, or any specific figure, sits in those accounts.
The reach of these pages is not limited to their follower counts, as both have been amplified by figures with genuine political standing.
Frank Amoakohene, the Ashanti Regional Minister in the current NDC government, has repeatedly shared content from one of the pages across multiple posts (see here, here, here, here, and here).
Meanwhile, Dennis, who is currently vying for the NPP’s National Communications Director position, publicly vouched for the pro-NPP Ghana Today page, describing its work as “doing some good work” in a Facebook post.
Academic and known NPP supporter, Frank Bannor, is also a regular conduit for the page’s content, sharing its posts regularly (see here and here).
False framing now a political weapon- Experts
Experts say pages like the two Ghana Today platforms deliberately mimic the visual language of established newsrooms that audiences have learned to trust. The resemblance blurs the lines between accurate information and misinformation or disinformation.
The programme manager for independent journalism at Media Freedom for West Africa (MFWA), Kwaku Asante, said it becomes extremely difficult for audiences to tell what is accurate and what is not. The tourism figures and the Hamid misquote documented above are cases in point, both dressed in the visual conventions of legitimate news, which is precisely what let them travel.
“It pollutes the information environment, and it is so bad that it does so deliberately,” said Alfa Shaban, FactSpace West Africa’s editor. He added that resharing content on social media takes it into large closed groups (10,000 to 20,000 members). This makes the exact reach impossible to measure, and confirmation bias means corrections are rarely made.
“It doesn’t matter what clarification you are giving. People just believe that this is what I have seen,” he said.
Both experts confirmed that perpetrators often strip original context to insert a false narrative. Shaban said the perpetrators purposely share distorted information because false framing is their core product.
However, taking them down is far harder than it looks. Asante said cases should go to Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority but conceded enforcement becomes politically radioactive. “Once a page’s leanings are known, you don’t touch them,” he said.
Shaban also stated that because the pages do not incite violence or crime outright, Meta has little or no leverage to act. Meanwhile, taking down the pages would not solve the underlying problem.
“Even if you shut one down, three, four, five more could be put in, because they are making an impact, even if it is not a good impact,” he said.
Meanwhile, Asante warned authorities to tread cautiously to avoid violating free speech, which he described as a major ingredient in democracy.
“Free speech is a major ingredient for our democracy, so we need to tread cautiously on how to shut people down. But authorities must have a robust system that protects free speech while limiting abusive narratives that threaten our security, safety, and social cohesion, and where we draw the line is when people get into too much criminality,” he said.
Shaban recommended publicly discrediting the pages and building public literacy, so audiences think twice before trusting a source.
Asante described the battle as platforms and political will both failing at once.
“The challenge is that they are set up towards certain political lines, depending on who is in power and who is not. Then, it begins to appear like it’s an extension of some of their own political parties or the government’s disinformation strategies to control the narrative,” he stated.
“You don’t touch them. The platforms have done little to nothing, quite frankly, in dealing with these problems,” he added.
For Shaban, it’s an arms race that legislation is unlikely to outrun.
“We are looking at legislation, but again, that’s a long-term fix. And for all you know, it is not going to be effective. Because again, people are going to create those pages anyway,” he stated.
A law in need of repair
Abdulai Jalaldeen, a lawyer, said Ghanaian law does not permit the wholesale shutdown of a media platform no matter the deception its content carries.
Instead, the law offers two separate tracks, one civil, one criminal, depending on who initiates it and what harm is alleged.
For an individual who has been the subject of false publication, the remedy lies in civil court.
“If an individual publishes information that is false about someone, that person can sue for retraction, apology and compensation,” Jalaldeen said.
But where a publication carries broader risk, not just harm to an individual, but the potential to destabilise public order, the law shifts from a private matter to the state level.
“If the publication is likely to cause fear and panic, or has the potential to cause unrest in society, then Section 208 of Act 29 will be applied to prosecute the publisher,” Jalaldeen said.
“It is the state that will trigger Section 208, and the affected individual will go civil for the retraction, apology and possible compensation,” he further stated.
Depending on the harm caused, the Facebook pages are susceptible to private lawsuits from individuals they have misquoted, or state prosecution if their content is judged capable of inciting public disorder.
However, Section 208 of Article 29 is itself contested. Kwaku Azar, a lawyer, argued that while the provision does not absolutely criminalise free speech, its operation assesses rather than restricts opinion.
Azar pointed to several defects, including undefined and “elastic” language. Terms like fear, alarm, and disturbance of the public peace, he said, fall short of the objective standards criminal law requires. Criminal law, he says, requires a faulty threshold that risks punishing editorial misjudgment rather than deliberate falsehood and a due diligence clause. He argued that this shifts the burden of proof onto the accused.
Azar’s proposed fix was to narrow Section 208, limiting liability to clearly false statements intended to incite imminent unlawful violence or disorder. It should also consider statements likely to produce such an outcome while shielding criticism of government and public officials from prosecution.
MFWA has documented that Section 208 of the Criminal Offences Act and Section 76 of the Electronic Communications Act have been applied with unusual frequency under the current administration. About 14 arrests were recorded within 16 months, compared to eight recorded across the entire eight-year tenure of the previous government.
Those arrested span a wide range of ordinary citizens and public figures, including opposition NPP’s Bono Regional Chairman Kwame Baffoe (Abronye DC). He was arrested twice between September 2025 and April 2026 on charges of offensive conduct and publishing false news. A former parliamentary aspirant and opposition activist was arrested in May 2025 over social media allegations of judicial misconduct, while several TikTok creators faced arrest over mocking commentary about officials killed in the August 2025 helicopter crash.
But no case involved the Ghana Today pages, despite its regular use of fabricated quotes and statistics to mislead the public on matters of national concern.
The group has renewed its long-standing call to repeal both Section 76 and Section 208 altogether because the discretion increases the risk of politically motivated application of the aforementioned laws.
Loopholes for Meta
On paper, Meta’s own rules give it more room to act. Meta’s Fraud, Scams, and Deceptive Practices policy separately bars pages that establish a fake persona or impersonate a news outlet using sensationalist or exaggerated claims. But experts question why Meta has not taken the pages down.
Outside the US, Meta relies on independent fact-checkers to rate posts one at a time as false or misleading. A page only faces real penalties, like reduced reach or losing its spot in recommendations, after it repeatedly posts flagged content. That gives pages like Ghana Today room to keep publishing selectively edited material faster than the system can catch up.
On top of that, Meta admits its public reporting is incomplete. It says its threat reports do not cover every enforcement action it takes, so there is no way to know from outside whether these two pages have ever actually been reviewed. Even when Meta does remove a page, that mostly just raises the cost of starting a new one. It does not remove the reason these pages exist in the first place.
With the integrity of public discourse at risk, Ghanaians are left with a question begging for answers. How long will Ghanaian politicians continue to exploit loopholes without decisive regulation or platform accountability?
This report was produced under the 2026 Kwame Karikari Fact-checking and OSINT Fellowship, co-hosted by DUBAWA and the Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Information Disorder Analysis Centre (DAIDAC), with support from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).
