TikTok Boosted a Warlord's Boast About Mass Murder. This Newsroom Stopped Him

Sudan is currently experiencing one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on earth. Two warring military factions are tearing apart a country of 50 million people. More than 9.6 million people have been internally displaced, and another 4.3 million have fled across borders. Yet, the Western media has largely looked away.In the vacuum left by international indifference, a terrifying proxy information war has taken over — an AI-driven psychological operation designed to manufacture alternative realities.My guest on this week’s episode of Deadliners is Raghdan Orsud, a communications expert and co-founder of Beam Reports, an independent Sudanese news and fact-checking platform. Launched in 2021 to safeguard Sudan’s democratic transition, Beam has spent the last few years fighting an uphill battle not just against totalitarian forces, but against the apathy of Silicon Valley and the sudden collapse of global media funding.Deadliners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Rebuilding from a Laptop in ExileWhen fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the spring of 2023, Beam Reports was just finding its footing. They had built a physical studio in Khartoum using local funds and the equipment was still in boxes when the RSF seized their offices. Raghdan and her co-founders fled to Nairobi, Kenya, instructing their reporters to leave everything behind because traveling through military checkpoints with a laptop carrying a journalism logo was a death sentence. “When the war happened … we found ourselves out of the country with absolutely nothing but personal funds,” Raghdan said. “No funding, no savings, no equipment.”Today, traditional independent media inside Sudan has largely collapsed. Out of 1,500 active journalists before the war, it’s estimated only about 70 are left working in the country’s conflict zones.When Algorithms Reward War CrimesWithout a robust local press, regional state-backed media networks have weaponized the information space. More chillingly, warlords and extremists have found a highly profitable home on Western social media platforms.Beam Reports exposed ‘Abu Lulu,’ an RSF fighter who used TikTok Live to openly boast about murdering over 2,000 civilians in Darfur. Instead of banning him, TikTok’s algorithm actively rewarded his videos with massive engagement."The platforms that we live in now, they don't just make it harder for hate speech and incitement to violence to exist—they reward it. He was making money out of that content." — Raghdan OrsudBeam pressured TikTok into taking the content down. Their relentless monitoring eventually forced Meta to bring them on as an official third-party fact-checker for Sudan. But Raghdan is candid about the structural indifference of Big Tech:“Sudan is not a priority. Any country that does not bring in money is not a priority for big tech companies. I get that part from a corporate perspective. But if you are positioning yourself as a global platform, there’s a responsibility that comes with that.”Coordinated DisinformationThrough their specialized division, Marsad Beam, Raghdan’s team tracks sophisticated deepfakes and coordinated foreign influence operations. They recently exposed a massive, digital psychological campaign on X (formerly Twitter) promoting a completely fabricated narrative that Islamist extremist groups were attacking Christian citizens in Sudan. When Beam mapped the network behind the narrative, they found it was driven by a coalition of Emirati and Israeli accounts alongside far-right figures in Europe and the United States. The goal, Raghdan said, was to reframe a domestic, territorial military power struggle into a religious holy war to manipulate Western foreign policy.The End of USAID FundingDoing this verification work requires resources. But independent media across the Global South was dealt a devastating blow last year. Historically, the US government was the single largest funder of independent media worldwide, but when the Trump administration froze and effectively dismantled USAID in early 2025, that financial pipeline vanished almost overnight.For smaller media organizations, the impact was immediate and catastrophic. Raghdan explains that legacy Western grant models actually left media houses uniquely vulnerable to this sudden political shift.Beam Reports had to downsize and cut a critical project aimed at building a round-the-clock Sudan Fact Check Network. They survived by scrambling to diversify their revenue, but the crisis served as a brutal, global reality check: Independent journalism cannot rely on foreign state charity to survive.Listen to the podcast to hear our entire conversation, and don’t forget to share this post and subscribe to Deadliners for weekly, deep-dive interviews on how the human craft of journalism survives, adapts, and thrives in an automated world. Get full access to Deadliners at deadliners.substack.com/subscribe