The brutality of Sudan’s civil war, which has ground on for nearly three years, is hard to comprehend. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and 12 million people have fled their homes. Hunger is rampant.
Digital warfare is also contributing to the chaos. “Sudan’s information ecosystem has become a battlefield as brutal as the physical conflict itself,” according to a recent report on information manipulation in Sudan, whose authors include Aida Al-Kaisy and Amal Hamdan. Published by Thomson Foundation, a nonprofit supporting the media, the report tracks who is behind online disinformation about Sudan, what methods they use, and how this links to violence on the ground.
Online disinformation has been able to spread so swiftly because Sudan’s media landscape has been shattered by the war. Like others, Sudanese journalists have been displaced in huge numbers, and media organizations have crumbled. According to the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate, 80% of journalists have lost their jobs. Social media has stepped into the breach, with methods ranging from crude to highly sophisticated.
In some cases, according to the Thomson Foundation, disinformation leads directly to attacks. For instance, within two days of a Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) officer’s Facebook post, accusing people in the Shambat area of collaborating with the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a community kitchen was attacked by a suicide drone. In a chilling pattern, there are systematic efforts to sow disinformation, hate speech, and dehumanizing images in areas where militants want to carry out operations.
Apart from individual campaigns, collectively the disinformation has the effect of perpetuating the conflict. Online accounts are casting suspicion on humanitarian workers, traditional media, and sometimes even ordinary Sudanese people calling for peace.
The report states, “Disinformation serves as a powerful mechanism to ensure the war continues, protecting the political and financial interests of the warring parties. Any individual or group calling for peace, dialogue, or non-violent responses is systematically attacked, isolated, and accused of treason by both sides.” These anti-peace sentiments can be quickly amplified by bot armies.
Overall, according to the report, “Sudan’s digital information environment operates as a systematically polluted ecosystem where both warring parties deploy organised disinformation and hate speech, forcing communities to consume toxic narratives that fuel social division, trauma, and violent reactive behaviour.”
Division is stoked so easily because the information is spreading in highly unequal ways. Information in Arabic is often distinct from that in English, as are the narratives perpetuated by the two warring factions.
AI is intensifying the digital chaos, especially after the RSF’s takeover of the city of El Fasher in October 2025, which led to mass killings. One anonymous interviewee suggested to the Thomson Foundation researchers, “In the period following the conflict, an estimated 90% of the videos and posters that spread were AI-generated, not real.” The outpouring of AI-generated content allowed combatants to deny killings and blur the lines between authentic and fake evidence.
Communication Outages Compound Suffering
Even with disinformation rife online, cutting off the internet isn’t the solution. WhatsApp, Facebook, and other platforms have been a lifeline for displaced people, volunteers, and humanitarian organizations in and concerned about Sudan. However, access to those platforms has been severely challenged.
Tactical communication blackouts in Sudan are not new. But the country’s telecommunications infrastructure has eroded since the civil war started in April 2023, as combatants have continued to target this infrastructure. This escalated in February 2024, when the RSF took over control of internet service providers in Khartoum, initiating a country-wide internet blackout. Parts of the country started to return to service over a month later, but telecommunication service remains unstable. The government has restricted WhatsApp calls since July 2025.
The effects have been numerous. Unreliable communication affects local humanitarian groups’ fundraising, reporting to donors, access to banking, and access to medical services. It also takes an immediate emotional toll, keeping people overseas from contact with loved ones in Sudan.
The blackout has also made it impossible to know just how many people have died, or what the full scale is of the atrocities committed by the RSF and SAF. Overall, the services that are helping to cushion the damage of this devastating conflict are being limited by the communications issues.
One popular platform has been Facebook Lite, a version of the social network that works well on low-bandwidth devices. However, mass Facebook groups have spawned plenty of manipulated content.
Some people have turned to Starlink, run by SpaceX. This satellite-based internet service is not vulnerable to conflict in all the same ways as ground-based systems. RSF soldiers have reportedly imported Starlink devices, making it necessary to negotiate with them in the street for access. Overall, satellite internet is expensive and inaccessible to many. Those with the means use it only when needed.
Financial hurdles have also affected emergency response rooms (ERRs), communal kitchens that have been providing meals throughout the conflict, despite the intense challenges of sourcing food and dealing with arrests. ERRs typically use e-banking. These small local groups are able to operate in parts of the country where big international organizations are unable to move. They also have direct contact with people in need. The international aid organization Mercy Corps has itself called for at least 25% of donor funds to go directly to local groups through unconventional funding models. Volunteers have also urged donors to provide more Starlink devices—in addition to pressing the RSF and SAF, and their foreign backers, to end the violence.
But the ERRs report being overburdened, not least by the hardships in communicating with funders. Donor organizations can lessen the burden by reducing the number of intermediaries and reporting requirements needed to release badly needed funds.
The Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), a network of organization pooling communication services during humanitarian agencies, has been active in Sudan since May 2023. Other efforts are underway to expand internet. In August 2024, the ETC established an undersea fiber internet service. It has also bought networking equipment amounting to $3 million, with plans to conduct training workshops in October.
But this progress hasn’t been able to keep up with the pace and the scale of the need, amid an extreme shortfall in ETC funding. And the ETC internet service, while important to the aid agencies benefitting from it, isn’t accessible to the bulk of Sudan’s people.
Instead of shutting off the internet due to hybrid warfare in Sudan, the Thomson Foundation calls for more moderation by social media platforms, including quickly blocking fake accounts and reducing the reach of hate speech. It also urges more support for independent and credible Sudanese media, including factchecking and debunking activities.
The answer, then, isn’t less information. It’s better information—recognizing that the armed forces, the governments funding them, and the tech companies profiting from viral content all have an incentive to keep circulating false information. While Sudan’s crisis is the most urgent, the kinds of information warfare being waged there could be deployed anywhere in the world.
