How Big Tech is ‘failing the Sudanese people’
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo isn’t dead. But the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary organization formerly known as the Janjaweed, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s — was rumored to have died this week, as the RSF and Sudan’s armed forces continue to wage war against each other on the streets of Khartoum.
It started with a tweet from what looked like the official account of the RSF. Nearly a million people saw it, and more than a thousand retweeted it. Many surely saw the account’s blue checkmark as confirmation that this was the real RSF. Except it wasn’t. @RSFSudann (note the extra “n”) has existed for years but only recently acquired a blue checkmark, thanks to Elon Musk’s new approach to “verification,” in which anyone can claim to be anyone else, so long as they’re willing to pay him $8 per month.
There was plenty of chatter about the new verification paradigm this week — long-dead public figures from Hugo Chavez to Anthony Bourdain mysteriously became verified, and a row between verified-but-not-real and unverified-but-real accounts representing New York City made for some laughs. But what happened with @RSFSudann is all too serious.
Just a few days before the false news of Dagalo’s death appeared on Twitter, hundreds of Twitter accounts began promoting and retweeting RSF content in a style that bore many hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign.