How Tunis's Official Communications Got Buried Under a Flood of Repeated Images — and What Comes Next

The problem did not arrive overnight. Tunis's municipal digital infrastructure has spent roughly four years absorbing the consequences of uncoordinated content uploads, a backlog of duplicate imagery now estimated to affect dozens of official pages managed by the Commune de Tunis and affiliated district offices. The duplication is most visible on the city's public-facing portals covering urban planning approvals, neighbourhood renovation announcements, and transport updates — precisely the pages residents consult most.

The issue matters now because the Commune de Tunis is midway through a digitisation drive launched under its 2024–2027 smart-city roadmap, a programme designed to consolidate services onto a single citizen-facing platform. Auditors reviewing progress earlier this year flagged image duplication as a structural obstacle: duplicate files slow page-load times, complicate database searches, and — critically — push genuine updated notices below repeated older visuals, meaning residents can miss current information entirely.

A Paper Trail That Points to the Early Covid Years

The roots of the duplication problem trace back to 2020 and 2021, when municipal offices along Avenue Habib Bourguiba and in the Bab Bhar administrative quarter shifted rapidly to remote working with little central coordination. Staff uploaded announcements to departmental sub-pages without a shared asset library or naming convention. The same photograph of a road resurfacing project on Rue de Rome, for instance, might sit in six separate folders — each tagged differently, none flagged as redundant.

The Agence Nationale de la Sécurité Informatique, which advises public bodies on digital governance, began issuing guidance on content deduplication protocols in late 2022, but uptake among municipal departments was inconsistent. By mid-2023, the Avenue de la Liberté district office alone had accumulated more than 400 image files in its public tender section, of which a technical review found roughly a third were exact or near-exact copies of files stored elsewhere on the same server.

A separate complication came from the municipality's decision in 2021 to migrate legacy content from an older content management system into a newer platform without running a deduplication pass first. That decision, made under time pressure and a constrained budget cycle, effectively imported the problem wholesale into the new environment. Technology procurement records show the migration contract was valued at 180,000 Tunisian dinars — a figure that did not include a post-migration content audit, which specialists later said would have added roughly 15 percent to the project cost.

What the Clutter Costs in Practice

The practical consequences are visible to anyone who has tried to track a planning application in the Medina or follow updates on the Lac de Tunis waterfront regeneration project. Residents searching for current documents often encounter thumbnail grids packed with visually identical images, with no date-stamp visible until they click through. Community associations in the Lafayette and El Menzah neighbourhoods have raised the issue at district council sessions, arguing that the visual noise effectively buries accountability.

Digital governance researchers familiar with North African municipal systems point to Amman and Casablanca as cities that ran structured deduplication audits before scaling their citizen portals — a sequencing Tunis skipped. The comparison is instructive rather than flattering.

The Commune de Tunis has now contracted a content audit covering its eight main sub-portals, with a completion deadline set for the end of September 2026. The work involves both automated hash-matching tools, which identify byte-for-byte duplicate files, and a manual review layer for near-duplicates — images that are cropped or resized versions of the same original. Residents and journalists who file public-records requests in the meantime are advised to specify document reference numbers rather than relying on image searches, and to direct queries to the physical documentation office on Rue Farhat Hached, where paper archives remain indexed by project code. The September audit, if completed on schedule, is expected to clear the path for the smart-city portal's full public launch before the end of the year.