Misinformation is a weapon without ammunition, used in wars as a fertile environment for the spread of fake news, given people’s susceptibility to believing any information amid the state of anxiety and anticipation they are experiencing, without realizing the importance of verifying the source of the news or confirming the authenticity of the image. This requires awareness of the importance of knowing the truth so that disinformation does not become a dangerous tool that serves its promoters and their goals.
Misinformation is spread by feeding technological tools in both the virtual and real worlds, using sites such as Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, and others, by falsifying news and images generated by artificial intelligence to cover up the truth or distort the position of a particular party.
In the Sudanese war, which has been raging for more than three years and has seen many violations against civilians, there has been a recent increase in fabricated news and images about what happened in the Sudanese city of El Fasher in the Darfur region, through the deliberate exaggeration of practices and violations that took place there, and the manipulation of information and images using artificial intelligence.
Platforms affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in multiple countries have played a key role in spreading huge amounts of false images, videos, and information, showing members of the Rapid Support Forces shooting and torturing civilians, as well as corpses lying on the ground, or a video showing two children whose mother was killed by Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher, when in fact the video shows two children who survived a Sudanese air force bombing that killed their third brother and injured their mother in Kordofan last September.
Platforms specializing in detecting misinformation have confirmed that most of these videos and images are false, as they are either generated by artificial intelligence, fabricated, taken out of context, or relate to events that have nothing to do with Sudan. A photo was also posted on Facebook, which its publishers claimed was of a woman hugging her child for fear of being killed, but it turned out that the real photo was generated by artificial intelligence, showing a woman hugging her child, with two armed men visible in the shadows.
Investigations also found a photo of a woman hanging from a tree with two children, but a report by the PIM Observatory, which specializes in exposing misinformation, confirmed that the photo is misleading and has no connection to Sudan. It was posted on February 18, 2025, on the X platform as an incident that took place in Chad. It was also circulated a day later in the context of violent events in Mali.
However, this does not deny that violations occurred in El Fasher and that there were innocent victims. The exaggeration of what happened was intended to exonerate the other side by misleading local and international public opinion and stirring up sympathy and anger, which indicates that behind it are disinformation networks with high technical capabilities and considerable experience.
The Bim platform warned that false content undermines the value of real evidence, as was the case with images taken from Google Earth of the city of El Fasher, which were claimed by those promoting them to be of mass killings that took place last October. However, the fact-checking website “The truth about misinformation” confirmed that the image was taken from Kumi Island, dozens of kilometers away from El Fasher, and was first published on Google Earth on March 27, 2022.
The war is raging on the ground, but another, perhaps even fiercer war is raging on social media, where misinformation is spreading at an alarming rate.
Editorial in Al-Khaleej newspaper, Wednesday, November 12, 2025
