On a humid Tuesday morning in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, a group of men and women filed into a conference hall carrying folders, phones and the weight of a question that has haunted their country for years: how do you stop a war before it starts? The occasion was a three-day national workshop, convened by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in collaboration with the African Union Commission and United Nations agencies, to build a multi-agency platform against hate speech and disinformation. For many in the room, this was not an abstract policy issue. They had lived through the consequences…

In the middle of a war defined by explosions, drone strikes, and artillery fire, there is something almost poetic about the idea of a cyberattack that makes the internet feel cleaner. That was the hopeful image President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to the world on Monday, just days after Ukrainian military drones reportedly took out several Russian data centers tied to Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company. Speaking with visible optimism, Zelenskyy claimed that the operation had dealt a real blow to Moscow’s sprawling disinformation machinery. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” he said. “There was…