كتائب الظل: “The Shadow Battalions”
Disinformation in Sudan- challenging the transition to democracy
Can online disinformation derail the transition to democracy? That’s the question we’ve been exploring in Sudan over this last year.
This is Facebook’s description of a disinformation network they disrupted in June on the basis of our research. It was one of the largest reaching networks taken down at the time with 1.8 million accounts following one or more of the removed accounts. According to Facebook figures there are roughly 6 million registered users in Sudan, so the network was reaching perhaps a third of Sudan’s online population. The disrupted network produces ‘Islamist’ messaging hostile to the ‘civilian led transitional government’. Our research over the last year shows it has a large and growing reach in a country undergoing a vital, fragile, transition to democracy. The techniques employed by ‘Shadow Battalions’ in Sudan are almost identical to those we see deployed in the UK and US.
Sudan’s hard journey towards democracy
Since 1989 Sudan has been governed by an Islamist military dictatorship until a civilian uprising took to the streets in 2019 leading to a new civilian-led government which is supposed to end its transition to democracy at elections in December 2022. The stakes are high; under the previous regime Sudan hosted Osama Bin Laden and extreme violence in Darfur- nobody wants to see the country deteriorate again.
Figure 2: An iconic photo from Sudan’s 2019 revolution Photograph: Lana H Haroun
But the transition hasn’t been easy and the country remains beset by conflict and economic crisis. The interim Government has been the target of virulent attacks, often based on faked “evidence” such as falsified government documents. Within the last two months there have been organised efforts online to mobilise the kind of street protests that removed the military dictatorship, in efforts reminiscent of the storming of the US capitol on 6 January.
On 30 June, conservative online Islamist networks produced and aggressively amplified content like the below calling for insurrection in Khartoum. We knew in advance that these protests would not involve as many people as this busy online activity suggested because a great deal of that activity was automated rather than organic, using a method Facebook calls ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour’.
Figure 3: The disinformation network amplified this message simultaneously across multiple Facebook groups. It reads: “Urgent call! All revolutionaries must go to the Republican Palace! The security cordon has been broken, now all the processions across the bridges are on their way to you #Million_30June”
The ‘Shadow Battalions’
When we started tracking these networks over a year ago they reached roughly 2 million followers. We delivered a dossier to Facebook in April 2021 when we assessed their reach to have grown to 4.4 million. By June 30, the reach had grown almost 40% to 6.1 million (greater than the total number of registered users in Sudan). Facebook started to take action on 28 June. But the network is still growing with significant reach in a fragile country of 43 million.
Figure 4: Audience growth of the inauthentic Islamist influence network over time (in millions).
So who is running these efforts? Facebook’s report provides some clues; ads were paid for in Turkish lira and Saudi Arabian Riyal, and we have tracked Egyptian efforts to build support for Egypt’s policy agenda for Sudan. But there is likely to be as much, if not more, local manipulation. The previous Sudanese Government was infamous for its use of online manipulation to try to manipulate public opinion in support of the regime. Sudanese call these “كتائب الظل”, or the former regime’s “Shadow Battalions”.
The stakes for Sudanese political actors could not be higher; the civilian government shares power alongside the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and previously influential Islamist parties are hoping to restore their influence. All of these groups want to convince ordinary Sudanese (and their opponents) that they represent the majority, the “real Sudanese”.
Are the shadow battalions succeeding?
Many of these efforts have failed; content encouraging the 30 June protests was amplified over 10,000 times online but generated a fraction of that on the streets of Khartoum. Efforts to encourage Sudanese hostility towards the Ethiopian military was met with indifference. But these networks are growing rapidly in Sudan and are a source of acute concern by veterans of the 2019 protests who hope to see the country transition to democracy soon. Compared to other infamous manipulation campaigns like those of Iran in Iraq, the Sudan network is generating impressive numbers: a Facebook disruption of an Iranian operation in Iraq in the same period was reaching only 361,000 followers. Sudan’s shadow battalions have a much wider reach.
What can be done?
We were satisfied to see a third of the Sudan network removed immediately before the attempt of 30 June (perhaps one reason why the planned street protests were a disappointment), but most of this manipulative effort remains online, and is still growing. Facebook’s takedown targeting and decision making remains opaque, and news reports suggest deep divisions between Facebook’s investigators, concerned by what they see on the platform, and executives who fear bad publicity and would rather restrict the ability of organisations like ours to investigate online manipulation.
There are those within Facebook who clearly recognise the harm these deceptive online influence efforts can have; internal reports about Myanmar and the violence at the US Senate in January point to the role that platform has played in mobilising violence. But these debates are for now conducted only internally.
What Facebook does next with the remaining network matters to Sudan. And where they go next with access to their platform and enforcement matters for influence efforts across the world, most acutely in places with fragile politics.
Facebook and other tech companies would prefer to respond with less draconian measures; resting on (easily evaded) automated restrictions on duplicative content, the clarifying power of ‘fact checks’’ (despite the research suggesting the limits of this approach) or relying on algorithms to reduce the visibility of content deemed deceptive. But as we described in our last newsletter, these measures have not kept pace; despite a sustained effort by Facebook to engage with the anti-vax challenge in its home market, it has not been able to match the efforts of anti vaxxers. And the imminent arrival of AI capable of writing compelling human-sounding text will further expand the reach of potential disinformation actors, with less need for spamming duplicate content when AI can write new prose at scale indistinguishable from human efforts.
Figure 5: The Islamist network amplifies duplicate content to attack the increase of the legal age of marriage in Sudan to 18.
There is of course a freedom of speech issue here. Nobody feels comfortable with tech firms removing potentially legitimate political speech, but if laws and norms about preserving democratic processes from efforts to manipulate them, whether financially or otherwise, are to mean anything, then more has to be done to prevent these campaigns. No tech firm is currently seriously invested in trying to understand what is happening on their platforms in fragile places like Sudan. Efforts to counter hostile disinformation campaigns in these places must start by disrupting the obviously inauthentic accounts conducting them. Sudan faces a unique set of circumstances, but the techniques being deployed against their democratic transition are becoming ubiquitous. What happens next, and whether Sudan’s shadow battalions are disrupted has a significance beyond East Africa.
The observations in this newsletter do not reflect the views of the clients or partners of Valent Projects.