Sudan: X Should Remove the RSF Militia’s Accounts

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n April 2023, a war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Thousands have been killed and millions have been displaced, not to mention the massive destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

With the world turning to social media to follow up on the news, the RSF militia started using X to deceive the public about the unfolding events and evade responsibility for the committed massacres and atrocities.

It’s time to deprive the RSF militia of the X platform and stop providing it with a megaphone to spread its lies.

The RSF militia was formed in 2013 after the restructuring of the notorious Janjaweed militia, which primarily supported the government’s counterinsurgency operations in Darfur and South Kordofan. In 2017, the Sudanese parliament passed a law legitimizing its activities.

According to several ​​independent reports, the RSF militia has committed countless crimes and atrocities, including destroying villages, killing protestors, sexual violations and rape, mass killings, unlawful detention, targeting hospitals and churches, ethnic violence, and restricting civilian movement during the ongoing war.

Reliance on social media

For years, the RSF militia has relied on social media to sway public opinion and wage its propaganda war. Most recently, after Facebook removed its official pages, the militia started to rely on its X accounts as its primary tool of misinformation.

In November, the RSF militia allied Arabia militias launched an attack on Ardmata, an area located in Darfur, Sudan, and populated by the Masalit people. According to the testimonies of the survivors and reports by international organizations such as the UN, more than 800 individuals were executed and killed based on their ethnicity. Despite the mounting evidence against it, the RSF’s official X account released a media statement falsely claiming the area was shelled by the Sudanese army forces and former regime members.

The militia provided no proof to back their concocted story. In June 2023, the RSF militia unabashedly tweeted condemning the assassination of the West Darfur governor, whom the militia themselves had killed. This crime pushed the U.S. to place sanctions against senior commanders of the militia.

Allegations of attacking churches

In other cases, despite confirmed reports and the official statement of the Sudanese Council of Churches that militia members had attacked several churches in Khartoum, the militia insisted on rejecting the allegations and described them as diverging attention from military losses.

During the ongoing war, the RSF members have engaged in large-scale looting of residential areas to the degree that several “Dagalo” markets, named after the militia leader, have been established across the country dedicated to the stolen goods. Contrary to all reports and eyewitness affirmations, the RSF responded with its usual tactic, tweeting that violations were a disinformation campaign by the Sudanese Armed Forces.

In a bid to boost engagement with their content, the militia has resorted to fake accounts and networks. For instance, in August 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) revealed how more than 900 potentially hijacked accounts are copying and pasting positive replies to the RSF’s and its leader’s official accounts on the platform to make them appear more popular.

A similar and recently created network was also exposed by Beam Report, a local Sudanese fact-checking organization.

Violation of X rules

The X platform is also utilized to disinform the public about the militia’s activities and its ties to infamous groups such as the Wagner Group so as to avoid any repercussions from this hidden relationship. Both the militia and its political advisor categorically denied the CNN report that the Ukrainian special forces attacked the Wagner Group, which is allied to the RSF in Sudan and supports it with military equipment. It is worth mentioning that the U.S. State Department later accused Wagner of supplying the RSF militia with surface-to-air missiles.

The existence of the RSF militia on X clearly violates two of the social media platform’s rules: the crisis misinformation policy that does not sanction sharing false and misleading information, and the content policy that prohibits violent and hateful entities. X should adhere to these rules and protect its users from the harm the RSF militia has been causing.

X should also listen to the Sudanese people who have created the hashtag #removedaglo requesting X to remove the RSF militia accounts, citing its extended violations and crimes against the country’s citizens.

Continuing to give the RSF militia an online platform will have a dire outcome: it aids it with a powerful tool to legitimatize its existence and, even worse, to cover up its impending genocide in the region.

The RSF militia and its affiliated accounts also utilized X to attack the Sudanese National Army. A recent analysis by Beam Report exposed a network of accounts that praise the RSF militia leader, spreading disinformation that claims Iran is backing the national army to have a foothold in the Red Sea region.

Following international outcry and strong condemnation of its ongoing massacres in Darfur, the official RSF militia account shared a fake meeting for the leaders of the Masalit tribe to show their support for the militia, the same tribe whose members the militia has executed and targeted on the basis of their ethnicity. In fact, no known leaders of the tribe appeared at this purported gathering.

To deceive the world about its ongoing genocides in Darfur, the RSF militia is using the big lie tactic employed during Nazi Germany; it’s simply that if you tell a lie big enough and then keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it; the underlying premise, according to Adolf Hitler, who used it to justify the Holocaust, is that no one will think anyone is insolent enough to distort the truth to such a degree.