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.
- 'All lying' -
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.
- 'Cyberjihadist' -
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 Liar's Dividend' -
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.
Nigerian defence minister to lead search for kidnapped schoolgirls
Lagos (AFP) Nov 20, 2025 -
Nigeria's President Bola Tinubu on Thursday ordered his minister of state for defence to go to western Kebbi state, where two dozen girls kidnapped from their boarding school earlier this week are still missing.
The order for minister Alhaji Bello Matawalle to "relocate to Kebbi State over the abduction of 24 schoolgirls" came as pressure mounted on the government after US President Donald Trump this month threatened military action over what he described as the killing of Nigeria's Christians, a narrative rejected by the Nigerian authorities.
A presidency statement said Matawalle had "experience in dealing with banditry and mass kidnapping", after he secured the release of 279 students aged between 10 and 17 who had been kidnapped from a government secondary school in 2021 in western Zamfara state.
Another state, Kwara, in the east of the country, has ordered some schools shut following a deadly raid on a church on Tuesday, a government official told AFP.
Gunmen stormed a church service in the state on Tuesday, killing at least two people.
Michael Agbabiaka, an elder of the church, told AFP that the attackers fired shots, beat up worshippers and ransacked bags, taking cash and mobile phones.
Speaking by phone, he said 35 people had been abducted by the attackers.
Following the attack, Kwara state government directed the closure of schools in four areas as part of steps to "address recent security breaches", state government spokesman Ibraheem Abdullateef told AFP.
"This decision was taken to checkmate kidnappers who may want to use schoolchildren as soft targets and human shields amidst a renewed crackdown on their hideouts by the security operatives," he said.
Nigerian security forces have been placed on high alert, the information minister said this week, as the country faces an uncomfortable spotlight on its security situation.
Tinubu has "postponed" a trip to South Africa for a G20 summit and to Angola for an Africa-EU meeting to receive "security briefings" on the kidnapped schoolgirls and the church attack, his office said.
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