The war in Sudan is increasingly being fought on the battlefield of social media, where competing factions trade fake news, doctored videos and triumphalist propaganda, hardening divisions in a country already fractured by years of conflict, analysts warn.

Since April 2023, a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, has thrust the country into what the United Nations describes as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Beam Reports, a Sudanese digital verification outlet, said it had published roughly 40 fact-checking investigations between May and July, more than half debunking claims related to the war.

Many involve “harmful narratives that appeared aimed at escalating tensions and prolonging the conflict”, said researcher Nihal Abdellatif.

The war has already killed tens of thousands of people, displaced nearly 12 million and created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises.

For many Sudanese, trustworthy information has become elusive.

“Every day I check what’s happening on social media,” said Amar Salah Omar, a 34-year-old Sudanese refugee living in Paris.

“We’re all looking for the truth, but it is very difficult. They are all lying and we have so little information.”

In early August, Sudan’s army-aligned state television reported that Emirati aircraft carrying Colombian mercenaries had been shot down near an airport controlled by the RSF.

The claim ricocheted across local and international media, though no evidence was provided.

In October, an image of a public hanging circulated widely after Algeria’s representative to the United Nations invoked it as evidence of RSF abuses.

The photograph, Beam Reports later confirmed, had appeared months earlier in Chad and bore no relation to Sudan.

Similar manipulations have surfaced in pro-RSF messaging, including recycled images purporting to show Sudanese soldiers looting homes.

With much of the country’s traditional press silenced by war, both sides “have taken advantage of this environment to disseminate propaganda, fabricate battlefield claims, circulate hate speech, and spread disinformation aimed at discrediting their opponents”, said Abdellatif.

The fall of El-Fasher to the RSF on October 26 marked a turning point both militarily and online.

As famine spreads, photos of malnourished or abused children — often taken in other African countries — have proliferated.

Videos of battlefield victories, set to triumphant music, also circulated alongside graphic clips of violence.

Accused of killing 460 patients and healthcare workers at a hospital in El-Fasher, based on images disseminated by its fighters, the RSF rejected the allegations as “narratives… with no connection to the truth”.

On its Telegram channel, the group countered with videos showing its fighters distributing aid and medical personnel tending to the wounded.

Online warfare is not new to Sudan. In the early 2010s, security services under former president Omar al-Bashir developed a “cyberjihadist” unit to quell grassroots mobilisation inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in neighbouring countries.

The military has revived similar tactics, said Clement Deshayes, a Sudan specialist at France’s Institute of Research for Development, “to discredit” the RSF.

The RSF, meanwhile, secured a “massive budget for media and public relations” even before the conflict, said Mahitab Mahgoub, a researcher at the Washington-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

This well-resourced campaign, including backing from the UAE, helped rebrand their leader Daglo as a state figure, Mahgoub told AFP.

Even before the war, roughly two-thirds of Sudanese people did not have internet access, according to the World Bank.

Now, communications outages and infrastructure failures have deepened the information vacuum, forcing many to rely on “word of mouth, and this is very dangerous”, said Hind Abbas Hilmi, a professor at the University of Khartoum.

The torrent of falsehoods in Sudan has helped entrench what scholars call the “liar’s dividend” — the idea that denials and counterclaims can be weaponised to “divert attention or to evade accountability or to undermine an adversary”, according to a recent report from Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Online rhetoric has run rampant, with calls for murder, and for the secession of Darfur” from the rest of the country, said Deshayes.

He described an “acceleration of fake news” and “more polarised, more brutal, more violent rhetoric”, encouraged by the warring parties.

One viral video authenticated by AFP shows a woman in RSF uniform urging RSF fighters to rape women.

Identifying herself as Major Shiraz Khaled, she proclaims that fighters should enter Sudan’s Northern State “for its girls” and “to purify their lineage”.

The same woman later posted a TikTok video showing a warm encounter with a presenter from the Emirati network Sky News Arabia during a mid-November visit to El-Fasher.

The presenter later posted on X, condemning what she described as “disinformation campaigns” on Darfur, echoing the rhetoric of the RSF.

The Emirati government has denied any involvement in the Sudanese conflict.