Cuban journalists are being silenced, one mobile line at a time
Residents of Khartoum found themselves without internet access on April 16, as violent clashes broke out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group descended from the militias that perpetrated genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. The warring entities have been in a power struggle since the ousting of former president Omar Al-Bashir in 2019 that has since escalated amid negotiations over Sudan’s attempts to transition to democracy. The internet blackout was ordered by Sudan’s telecom regulator and was implemented by at least one telecom carrier, MTN, which holds 37% of the local market. Two officials from the South Africa-based telco confirmed these reports, according to Al Jazeera. The blackout lasted only a few hours. Another outage, this time on Canar Telecom, was recorded by technical researchers on April 19.
Communications blackouts are scary in violent conflict situations, especially in places where mobile messaging services like WhatsApp dominate person-to-person communication. They leave people unable to seek shelter or medical attention or to find out if their loved ones are safe. At least this outage was mercifully brief. And it’s nothing new for people in Sudan. During the protests that brought down Al-Bashir, and the 2021 military coup, nationwide internet blackouts went on for days, and sometimes weeks, at a time.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Discord, the online discussion platform popular among gamers, was thrust into the national security spotlight last week when news broke that a young military officer named Jack Teixeira had published more than 100 classified documents, most of them related to U.S. strategy around the war in Ukraine, on a Discord server. Although it sounds like Discord has been quick to cooperate with authorities and to explain at least some of its response to the public, I’m still wondering whether it will become a new target of attempts to regulate tech platforms. Time will tell.
And the clock is also ticking in Turkey, where disinformation is peaking in the lead up to national elections on May 14. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Turkish government’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, voiced concern about disinformation in the wake of the February earthquakes and as polling day approaches. He might mean something different than we do. This week, Middle East Eye reported that at least 12,000 Twitter accounts were reactivated in Turkey, with most using either Russian or Hungarian as their primary language — sure signs of troll farms preparing to manipulate people’s understanding of what is and isn’t happening around them. We’ll be keeping close watch on the disinfo machine there as elections approach.