Digital Burial

Dr Ismail Sati
Burying the truth no longer requires concealing it. In the age of the internet and social media, the truth may remain directly before everyone’s eyes, yet become impossible to see beneath immense layers of information, comments, images, videos and contradictory narratives.
This is what I call “digital burial”.
In its physical sense, burial does not mean removing what lies beneath, but covering it with layers that make it difficult to reach. In the digital sense, the goal may not be to erase the truth, but to flood the public sphere with enough content that it gets lost beneath the rubble. This is where the danger lies.
From Misleading People to Overwhelming Them
The world has long known media manipulation and political propaganda. Their purpose was to persuade people of one particular narrative or conceal another. Today, however, it is not always necessary to convince the public of a specific narrative. Sometimes it is enough to present contradictory accounts, circulate them thousands of times, mix news with opinion, fact with rumour, and old material with new.
At that point, the question is no longer: “What is the truth?” but rather: “Is there any truth at all?”
This is one of the most dangerous consequences of digital burial. Once people lose the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, disinformation doesn’t need to triumph; it just needs to turn the truth into one narrative among many.
Burial Does Not Mean That Everything Beneath It Is False
Digital burial does not necessarily consist of false news. It may consist of information that is true but irrelevant, repetitive, selectively presented or stripped of its context.
During the Sudanese war, images of children suffering from hunger and displacement were repeatedly circulated as though they were recent photographs from Sudan, while verification showed that some dated back several years or originated in other regions. The image itself was not necessarily fake; the deception lay in the story attached to it.
Information may also begin with a single source and then spread across dozens of accounts and pages, creating the impression that it has emerged independently from multiple sources. Repetition then becomes a means of manufacturing perception. What we see repeatedly may gradually begin to feel like a fact.
The Algorithm: An Invisible Partner
Digital burial cannot be understood without understanding algorithms. Platforms do not necessarily show us what is most important or accurate. Instead, they tend to show us what they predict will attract our attention and keep us engaged for as long as possible.
Anger is more attractive than calm; conflict is more compelling than analysis; and a shocking headline spreads faster than a measured report.
As a result, the most sensational content may reach millions of people, while rigorous investigative reporting remains confined to a narrow corner. The problem, therefore, lies not only with those who produce content, but also with the system that determines which content reaches us first.
Artificial Intelligence: Burial on an Unprecedented Scale
Artificial intelligence tools have multiplied our capacity to produce, modify and rework texts, images, voices and videos at extraordinary speed.
In the context of the Sudanese war, a video circulated that appeared to document a mass grave in Sudan, before verification revealed that it had been generated using artificial intelligence. Here, people are not merely being deceived by a false report; an entire visual scene can be manufactured depicting an event that never happened.
Clips from video games have also been presented as real footage of fighting in Sudan.
We are therefore moving from the age of “misleading information” into the age of “misleading reality”.
Its Most Dangerous Uses Are Political
Digital burial becomes even more dangerous when it enters the political sphere.
A politician seeking to discredit an opponent does not always need to prove that the opponent is corrupt or dishonest. It may be more effective to surround that person with a cloud of allegations, rumours, questions, and insinuations, making it almost impossible to distinguish fact from slander.
The objective is not necessarily to make people believe the lie, but to make them stop searching for the truth.
Traditional propaganda says: “Believe this narrative.”
Digital burial says, indirectly: “You cannot know the truth in the first place.”
Sudan: When the Digital Sphere Becomes an Extension of the War
In Sudan, the war has not been fought solely on the ground. An extensive battle over narratives, interpretations, images and memory has accompanied it.
Multiple accounts of the same event circulate. Videos and photographs are shared out of context. The parties exchange accusations, while the same content is repeatedly distributed through extensive networks.
The Sudanese citizen therefore faces two challenges simultaneously: finding out what is happening, and determining whether what they are reading about those events is true or itself part of the battle.
This is where the greater danger lies: sustained digital burial may exhaust society’s collective capacity to verify information, leaving people prisoners of their preconceived narratives rather than the facts.
An Excess of Information Can Be More Dangerous Than a Lack of It
We have become accustomed to regarding a lack of information as a problem. Yet the digital age presents the opposite problem: an excess of information.
When information is scarce, people search for it. But when information becomes limitless, the challenge becomes: How do we choose? How do we verify? How do we distinguish what is important from what is peripheral, news from analysis, and truth from propaganda?
For this reason, an information society does not merely need more information. It needs institutions and standards for filtering and verification.
How Do We Confront Digital Burial?
We cannot confront digital burial by adding more burial. The response begins by restoring the importance of sources, context, evidence and verification.
We need professional journalism that can sort facts, independent institutions for fact-checking, and digital education that strengthens citizens’ ability to detect manipulation.
Most importantly, we must recognise that sharing content is a responsibility, not merely the act of pressing a button. Every user can become part of the machinery of digital burial when they repost information they have not verified or amplify content designed to provoke anger and fear.
Recovering the Truth from Beneath the Burial
Perhaps the real struggle in the digital age is not simply between truth and falsehood, but between truth and noise.
A lie can sometimes be exposed through evidence. Noise, however, does not need to be false to be dangerous. It only needs to be dense, repetitive, distracting and fast-moving.
Defending the truth therefore no longer means merely exposing false news. It also means removing the layers that obscure the truth and reorganising the information landscape so that people can see what is essential amid what is secondary.
Digital burial may not bury the truth forever. But it can make the truth harder to reach, make the search for it more costly, and leave people more doubtful and less trusting.
In the past, controlling information meant preventing people from accessing it.
Today, it may mean drowning them in information until they can no longer reach the truth.
And this is the great paradox of our digital age:
The truth is no longer threatened only by being hidden; it is also threatened by being buried beneath an excess of information.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=17486