Online Negative Sentiment Towards International Community Further Underlines Reputational Risks to Humanitarian Agencies in the DRC (February 2024) – Democratic Republic of the Congo

To support the humanitarian response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Insecurity Insight is conducting ongoing social media monitoring to understand perceptions and key concerns around the aid response, with the aim of contributing to the development of aid agencies’ communication strategies in response to community sentiment.

Summary

In February 2024 Kinshasa reeled from violent riots targeting United Nations (UN) and UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) staff and vehicles and foreign embassies in response to the degrading security situation near Goma. This social media monitoring brief provides an overview of DRC public sentiment expressed in the public social media space on Facebook and X from 9 to 11 February 2024 on topics related to the international community and humanitarian organisations in the DRC.

Findings:

• Negative sentiment is generally expressed by social media users towards the international community, which is seen as indifferent at best to the situation in the DRC, or directly complicit with Rwanda and its M23 proxy at worst.

• Western countries, including the United States (US), France and the United Kingdom (UK), were the subject of significant negative sentiment on public social media. In contrast, sentiment towards Russia appears to have been generally positive.

• Many DRC social media users seem to make a distinction between international actors and humanitarian agencies on public social media platforms, with criticism towards the humanitarian sector tending to be limited to UN aid agencies.

• However, messages circulating on encrypted WhatsApp channels suggest that this distinction between international actors and humanitarian agencies is not always made.

Consequently, and in view of the general circumstances, the risk of the DRC public’s frustration with the international community spilling over onto the aid sector remains significant.