"Sudan civil war: How Elon Musk's X is fuelling the conflict", 31 August 2024

Amid all of this, both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the opposing Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have made extensive use of digital propaganda...

...They share a mutual desire to whitewash their abuses while capturing the hearts and minds of the Sudanese people and foreign benefactors...

...But it’s Elon Musk’s hands-off approach to X (formerly Twitter) that has enabled the RSF - a brutal paramilitary force headed by warlord Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo - to build an online facade of compassion, masking the group’s heinous atrocities...

...As Sudan’s de facto head of state, SAF leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has unfettered access to government media channels and sympathetic news outlets....

...Hemeti’s video received well over 800,000 views in a few days on his official page alone. It painted an image of him as a concerned and committed leader...

...Observers routinely find that information on any RSF social media page cannot be considered reliable or credible...

...Putting in place limitations to stem the war in the digital domain is a low-hanging fruit that could make a difference in the meantime...

...Even in the context of X’s hollowed-out rules banning violent and hateful entities, this should be sufficient grounds to dismantle RSF-affiliated accounts on the platform, which combined have nearly half a million followers...

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