About the data
How Sudan Watch collects, processes, and presents information.
What is Sudan Watch?
Sudan Watch is an open intelligence dashboard tracking the Sudan civil war in real time across social media and news. It aggregates, classifies, and presents data from nine concurrent listening campaigns spanning six platforms in English, Arabic, and French.
The goal is to provide journalists, researchers, humanitarian workers, and engaged citizens with a clear, continuously updated picture of the conflict’s public narrative.
Data source: Socialhose
All data is sourced via Socialhose, a professional social media and news monitoring API. Socialhose aggregates content from major platforms and applies natural language processing to classify sentiment, detect keywords, and measure engagement.
Sudan Watch accesses Socialhose via its Public API. Data is cached server-side and refreshed hourly to remain within API rate limits while keeping the dashboard current.
Campaign structure: 5 thematic + 4 regional
Coverage is organized into 9 listening campaigns:
Thematic campaigns
- Sudan War & Military — Active conflict, frontlines, SAF/RSF operations, ceasefire
- Atrocities & Famine — War crimes, ethnic violence, famine, accountability
- Politics & Diplomacy — Peace talks, foreign powers, UN/AU/IGAD, governance
- Business & Economy — Gold, oil, sanctions, economic impact of the war
- Culture & Diaspora — Sudanese diaspora, cultural memory, refugee voices
Regional campaigns
- Khartoum & Central Sudan — Capital region, Gezira, Wad Madani
- Darfur — El Fasher, Nyala, Janjaweed, genocide accountability
- Eastern & Northern Sudan — Port Sudan, Blue Nile, Red Sea region
- Cross-Border & Refugees — Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, displacement crisis
Platform coverage
Sudan Watch covers six platforms: X (Twitter), Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Platform availability per campaign varies based on Socialhose data feeds.
Coverage spans English, Arabic, and French, reflecting the primary languages of Sudanese public discourse, regional media, and international coverage.
Keyword taxonomy
Each campaign is backed by 488 tracked keywords across 108 live searches. Keywords span names, places, organizations, events, and conflict-specific terminology in multiple languages.
Keywords are prioritized (high / medium / low) and categorized by theme. High-priority terms reflect the core actors and events of the conflict; medium and low terms capture broader context and emerging narratives.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment classification (positive, neutral, negative) is performed by Socialhose’s NLP pipeline at the document level. Sentiment reflects the emotional tone of the post, not an editorial judgment. War coverage inherently skews negative.
Update frequency
The API is polled continuously. The dashboard cache refreshes every 60 seconds for high-traffic pages and every hour for entity and topic pages. You may see data up to one hour old on less-visited pages.
Privacy
Sudan Watch does not collect personal data from visitors. The mailing list service (powered by Socialhose) uses double opt-in and does not share subscriber data with third parties. Email addresses are used solely to send the requested digests.
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