2023-04-24 22:05:41
In parallel with their battles in the field, the war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces is raging on social media platforms, in which various weapons of misinformation, fake accounts, and tactics of experts working in secret are used to tip one side over another.
Since the outbreak of the fighting on April 15, the army commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his rival, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” have resorted to “flooding the media with misleading information,” according to Ragdan Ursud, co-founder of the “Beam Reports” center, which investigates disinformation in Sudan. .
Yesterday’s allies, who led a coup that removed civilians from power in 2021, are engaged in a struggle for power that killed hundreds within a week, and all efforts to calm it failed.
The importance of platforms
The fighting has prompted millions of Sudanese to take shelter in their homes, with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter becoming primary sources of information.
Just as it is difficult to verify field data due to the danger of movement, checking information through communication sites is no less complicated, especially since a large part is deliberately broadcasting a service to one of the parties to the conflict.
Muhammad Suleiman, a researcher in the disinformation file at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, says that the two sides have published “twisted facts” in a media campaign to create a “state of fear” that controls people.
While no party has achieved significant field progress, experts believe that the Support Forces and Daglo have a long hand in the media battle.
Shortly after the fighting broke out, accounts linked to Dagalo and his forces began broadcasting, in perfect English, posts asserting that they were fighting “extremist Islamists” who were “waging a brutal campaign against the innocent” and defending “democracy.”
A specialist in Middle East affairs, who asked not to be named, believes that this indicates that the support forces “benefit from the services of experts in the field of image and electronic communication.”
Old tactics
For his part, Suleiman believes that the support forces “outperform” the army, which adopts “old tactics” in the war of words.
According to “Beam Reports”, the army uses fake accounts on social media, which were barely active before the battles.
These undocumented accounts published data for Al-Burhan and the army, as close as possible to misleading propaganda, according to the news fact-checking service of Agence France-Presse.
Accounts circulated on various platforms, video clips praising the army for launching air strikes on the headquarters of the support forces, seizing huge amounts of money from Daglo’s house, and launching air strikes in the north of the country… It turned out that the footage is old and dates back to Yemen and Libya, and some of it was even from video games.
What increased the risk of misinformation in the electronic battle, its coincidence with the Twitter administration stripping accounts of the free blue verification marks, including those officially belonging to Al-Burhan and Support Forces.
The consequences of this procedure appeared on Friday, as an account in the name of the Support Forces, bearing the authentication mark that became available through the payment service, announced that Daglo had moved “to the mercy of God, succumbing to injuries he sustained” during the battles.
Image polishing
Both sides of the conflict have a history of using social media to polish their image.
And the “Beam Reports” company monitored the existence of a “systematic campaign to polish the image of the paramilitary forces (Rapid Support)” on “Facebook”, which began in May 2019 after a military coup overthrew the regime of President Omar al-Bashir.
Tessa Knight of the American digital auditing laboratory, DFR Lab, confirms that the support forces previously manipulated communication platforms.
According to the laboratory, the forces have used “at least 900 potentially hacked Twitter accounts” since December 2022 to spread information about them and Daglo and “artificially” inflate their popularity.
Knight points out that these accounts portray Daglo as a “reformist military supporter of democracy, and a competent leader,” describing him with the outbreak of battles as “a hero fighting to protect Sudan and purify the country of traitors.”
Daglo did not leave his image hostage to chance. In May 2019, he signed a $6 million contract with the public relations and consulting firm Dickens & Madson in Montreal, managed by Israeli-Canadian businessman Ari Ben-Menashe.
The contract, a copy of which was seen by AFP, is for one year, subject to renewal, and stipulates that the company will carry out “lobby campaigns with leaders in the American and Russian executive and/or legislative authorities,” in addition to the United Nations, the African Union and other organizations.
The agreement came weeks before gunmen affiliated with the Support Forces were accused of dispersing pro-democracy protests in Khartoum, in which 128 people were killed.
foreign intersection
And in September 2021, just before Al-Burhan and Daglo’s coup against civilians, accounts that promoted the support forces were closed.
A close relationship developed between Al-Burhan and Daglo, and the two leaders sent fighters to Yemen in 2015 as part of an alliance, in support of the internationally recognized government.
Real… Dollar… Ruble
The international relevance of this campaign extends far beyond the Middle East.
In 2019 and 2021, Facebook closed Sudanese accounts supporting state and Russian media linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency, a group the United States accused of seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Also in 2021, the American platform revealed that these accounts were paying money “in Qatari riyals, (American) dollars, and (Russian) rubles” to promote them.
In March 2022, a Sudanese security official confirmed to AFP that “Russian experts are involved in securing communications and monitoring social networks for the benefit of state-related institutions” in Sudan.
In the same month, the countries of the “troika” group (Britain, the United States and Norway) said that the Russian “Wagner” group, headed by businessman linked to the Kremlin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, “spreads misleading information on social media” in Sudan.
Despite the multiplicity of parties involved in these campaigns, Ursud believes that it is possible to “confront any disinformation campaign, no matter how complex it is.”
Currently, the Sudanese have flooded the communication sites with information about providing relief and aid to those in dire need.
• In March 2022, a Sudanese security official confirmed to “France Press” that “Russian experts are involved in securing communications and monitoring social networks for the benefit of institutions linked to the state” in Sudan.
• It is also difficult to verify field data due to the danger of movement. Verifying information through communication sites is no less complicated, especially since a large part is deliberately broadcasting a service to one of the parties to the conflict.
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