Fake news poison the transition in Syria

DamascusThe relations between the Syrian central government and the country's various minorities constitute one of the main points of tension in the convulsive transition of the Arab country, initiated a year and a half ago with the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime. One of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence took place in the Druze areas, a confession split from Shia Islam. The first trigger for the massacres was the dissemination of a recording with insults to the prophet Muhammad falsely attributed to a Druze cleric.

This manipulated audio, with dire consequences, is the clearest example, but not the only one, of how the enormous amount of disinformation circulating on Syria's social networks poisons the transition, which is now approaching its first anniversary. In December, a coalition of Islamist militias launched a military offensive that managed to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's regime and end almost fourteen years of civil war. Since then, Ahmed al-Sharaa, leader of the most powerful rebel militia, presides over an interim government that has faced numerous incidents of sectarian violence, aggravated by hate speech and fake news that run rampant on Syrian networks.

"Syria faces the highest levels of disinformation and fake news of the modern era, in a context marked by a chaotic media landscape, conflicting interests, and the absence of trust. The problem has worsened dramatically after Al-Assad's fall," says Ruslan Trad, an expert at the Atlantic Council on this matter. A study by the Arab chain BBC quantified this phenomenon: it detected more than 400,000 messages with information about Syria on the social network X containing fake news during the four months following the fall of the leader.

Ammar Kahf, director of the think tank Omran Center for Strategic Studies, founded during the war in Syria and now based in Damascus, agrees with the diagnosis: "In Syria, the percentage of news that turns out to be false is enormous. Syrians get their information mainly from social networks and share a lot of fake news, which the diaspora then amplifies. In the end, the confusion is so great that everyone ends up believing what the people on their ideological side publish”.

The battle for the narrative continues

According to Trad, political debates on social media reflect the tensions and biases of a polarized and divided society based on sectarian, political, and regional differences. "The messages show an increase in sectarian rhetoric. Users use an inflammatory tone to discuss issues related to Alawites, Sunnis, Druze, and Christians," says Trad, noting that many of these messages originate outside of Syria and serve the interests of regional powers.

During the civil war, Syria became the object of desire for practically all the regional powers that intervened in the conflict. In the post-war period, this will to influence has not stopped. "There are signs of sectarian disinformation campaigns, some aligned with pro-Iranian or pro-Israeli agendas, but also promoted by accounts linked to Egypt, Turkey, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia or Russia," assures Trad.

"The first three months after the fall of the regime were very difficult because the volume of disinformation was very high. No matter how much you try to verify, some always slips through," comments Yassin Swehat, director of"Al-Jumhuriya, a newspaper aligned with the opposition to Al-Assad, which is undergoing a transition after many years of operating underground.

One of the factors that facilitates the success of disinformation campaigns is the absence of traditional media of reference in Syria that allow the population to cross-reference the information disseminated on social networks. In fact, due to supply problems, newspapers stopped being published during the war, and Damascus today is perhaps the only capital in the world without newsstands. "Public media are more concerned with spreading propaganda than news. To neutralize the fake news, the state should communicate with the population clearly, concisely, and truthfully", comments Rami Jarrah, one of the best-known dissident bloggers at the start of the revolution.