The Tigray War takes on all the aspects of a classic conflict, with its procession of armed offensives and counter-offensives. Only, notes the South African weekly The Continent, social networks add a new dimension: that of an information war to which Facebook is no stranger.
On November 5, AFP reported the arrest in Addis Ababa of UN Ethiopian employees detained by their own government over their origins [tigréennes] – a sign of the intensification of the conflict which is tearing Ethiopia apart. Days earlier, the country had appeared several times in documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data analyst at Facebook. These documents reveal how the inadequacies of the social network in terms of content moderation and security [des utilisateurs] have made Ethiopia vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation.
The “fog of war”
The Horn of Africa is the perfect example of the new relationship between information and conflict. This is proof that Africans must understand this phenomenon, to better prepare for it.
Now it is practically impossible to evoke [la guerre au Tigré] without suffering the consequences, especially on social media, and this partly explains why so few people dare to comment publicly on the crisis, including in defense of civilians. But in Ethiopia, the stakes are even greater. A former minister thus revealed that her relatives had been arrested, probably because of comments she had made on the Internet. We are faced with one of the most sophisticated operations ever undertaken to rewrite the history of online conflict without resorting to a blanket Internet shutdown. It’s the “fog of war” of the digital age, and social media is an integral part of the battlefield.
The “fog of war” is a military concept which designated [à l’origine] the inability of frontline soldiers to properly assess the situation in battle. The fighters were often
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Nanjala Nyabola
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