In today’s newsletter we’re going to look at efforts originating in Egypt to increase security tension between its neighbours Sudan and Ethiopia. As you read this there is a small industry of people running deceptive online campaigns to achieve political or security objectives (sometimes called “influence operations”). In a three year review, Facebook noted the increase in commercial companies offering this service: Cairo looks like a hub for this work.
We recently tracked one such operation from Sudan to Egypt: Sudanese looking content was being created and amplified to advance Egyptian military interests. Someone, almost certainly in Egypt, is likely paying more than $10,000 a month to run this network given the amount of content being produced and the number of pages administered.
The network is centred around a page called ‘Veto Sudan’, a page administered in Giza, Egypt. The first clue that an operation was ongoing was the appearance of a series of Facebook posts in Sudan; often very pro-military, pro Egyptian foreign policy positions and anti Ethiopia. The below ‘martyrdom’ post combines two of the three: commemorating the death of a Sudanese soldier killed in action against ‘Ethiopian militants’.
Posts like this originate from this ‘seeder’ account before being pushed by six Facebook ‘amplification’ pages, usually within minutes of the original post. The interactions with the content often looked unusual: numerous accounts with stock photos posting duplicative comments. For an example see here.
Veto Sudan has the same contact details and website as Veto News, an Egyptian Facebook news page, with almost 5 million followers which often tries to amplify Veto Sudan. All six of the ‘amplification’ accounts have administrators in Egypt. This network, established in February 2021 is now reaching over 26,000 people with Sudan focussed content.
Content posted to a group called “Yes to destroy Al-Nadha Dam '' a controversial dam being built by Ethiopia which Egypt believes is a threat to its water supplies via the Nile and the subject of furious regional diplomacy.
The Veto News Facebook Page is managed by ‘Sync’ from Giza, very likely Sync Egypt, a company advertising digital marketing services in Giza co-founded by Hatem Altokhey who lists Veto and other pro-Sisi media outlets, as previous employers. Hatem’s friend list on Facebook shows connections working at Bee Interactive, another Egyptian based company, recently named by Facebook and Graphika as running influence operations on behalf of Egypt in Ethiopia and Sudan.
As ever with digital campaigns, it is difficult to know what, if any, impact the thousands of views and engagements have beyond the digital world. But in both Egypt and Sudan there is plenty of evidence of the importance of social media in recent political turbulence, and no shortage of concern about the potential impact of campaigns like these.
Facebook’s report claims it is getting harder for deceptive actors to conduct influence operations, but the case of Veto Sudan suggests that these apparently increasing barriers have not prevented a relatively major campaign being operated despite Facebook simultaneously looking into similar techniques being used by other Egyptian firms also focussed on Sudan.
‘Naming and shaming’ alone is clearly not enough if these campaigns remain active. Some of the recent investigations into Russian techniques described the resource intensive and ineffective approach that they felt forced to adopt to maintain a degree of secrecy. But the case of Veto Sudan suggests that in some of the countries where this matters most, campaigns continue with little effort to hide their footprints. Until it becomes more costly to run these campaigns, we should expect them to continue.