Matti Pohjonen

Matti Pohjonen is a researcher of digital media, disinformation, and political conflict whose fieldwork on Ethiopia's information environment the vault reads at primary. He is lead author of the ARM Project working paper "Information Suppression in Ethiopia" (Deliverable D5.1, 2026) and co-author of the Global Voices / Advox report on AI-generated visual propaganda in Ethiopia's Red Sea discourse (2025) — the two documents on which this vault's account of Ethiopia's state-organized "media army" and its AI-propaganda campaign directly rests.

He earns a hub, rather than a mention, because his standing is not a single co-authored paper: he is the common investigator across two separately-read documents (co-authors rotate — Kebede & Aalen on the ARM deliverable, Tesfaye on the Global Voices piece — he does not), and that recurrence is itself a vault finding, not a biographical footnote. Reading both in full is what let the vault establish that Schroeder et al.'s "two sources" for the Red Sea case are better read as one investigation documented in two venues — a worked example of counting evidentiary roots, not citations. The ARM deliverable is Tier 1 and verified verbatim; the Global Voices piece Tier 2. What the vault knows of him beyond these two works it knows only as attribution (further named-investigator roles are asserted in the originating flag but not yet read here), so this page says what the documents support and no more.

References

• claim-arm-d51-ethiopia-media-army-apparatus-confirmed — D5.1, read directly: Ethiopia's government-organized "media army" apparatus, in the authors' own words (Tier 1, verified verbatim).
• claim-global-voices-red-sea-ai-propaganda-amplified-lenjiso — the Global Voices report, read directly: an AI-generated GERD-to-Assab propaganda video amplified by a former state minister (Tier 2).
• claim-arm-d51-global-voices-not-independent-shared-author — the shared-author finding: both documents reduce to his one underlying investigation of the September 2025 Red Sea campaign; not mutually independent corroboration.
• claim-arm-d51-llm-bias-pilot-no-evidence-ethiopia-manipulation — a further D5.1 finding, routed rather than overclaimed.
• claim-schroeder-2026-ethiopia-state-media-army-ai-red-sea-propaganda — the secondary synthesis that sent the vault to his work as its primaries.
• claim-meta-2021-corroborates-insa-half-arm-d51 and claim-media-manipulation-casebook-corroborates-d51-case3-etfactcheck — the two independent sources (different author groups, different venues) that corroborate parts of D5.1's findings, discharging its single-source concentration cap.