elections 2019

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Elections 2019: Known fake Twitter accounts to watch out for

Next year, South Africa will gear up for the Elections 2019 campaign. But whatever your persuasion, there’s an enemy we must all fight against…

elections 2019

Pixabay

With the Elections 2019 just around the corner (well, perhaps a little further away), South Africans will express their hard-fought democratic right to choose their own destiny.

However, it is a strange time for politics. The rise of social media, plus those who blur the boundaries between real and fake news, has made winning an election a completely different beast.

In years gone by, the campaigns were won on the streets – by canvassing the masses, rallying the people and knocking on the doors. Now we’re entering an age where social media is king. Those who can manipulate the dark forces of Facebook and Twitter can end up running away with the vote.

South Africa will not be any different next year, either. Already, we’ve experienced our own battle with the bots, during the Bell Pottinger and Gupta brothers scandal of 2017.

Also read: Elections 2019 – how to spot a fake Twitter account

The billionaires hired the PR firm to share fake, divisive messages about white monopoly capital. Their purpose was to cause racial division and dispute corruption allegations made against the family, framing any criticism as the work of “evil white business owners” behind the scenes.

But how can we avoid this when the polls open in 2019? As the Chinese proverb states; “the journey of 1 000 miles starts with the first step”. That’s what we’re aiming to do. Using data from Super Linear, we’ve compiled a quick list of the fake accounts that have the potential to warp the narrative:

Elections 2019: Known fake Twitter accounts in
South Africa:

@ITV5

This account rose to prominence during Helen Zille’s ill-judged colonialism tweets in 2017. They cultivated pro-Zuma, anti-DA support after being boosted by a hoard of fake followers whose “retweets” gave credence to the posts. The account has since been shut down, but beware of any similar @’s.

@AdamITV

This user, still active on the platform, is a huge advocate of radical economic transformation. Not a problem in itself, but research shows that the user’s retweet-heavy content – about the ANC Elective Conference, pro-Zuma sentiments and the backing from an army of US-based accounts – is bot-based.

@DodgyMinister

Here’s an obvious bot that isn’t active too often, but was used as part of Bell Pottinger’s “divide and misinform” strategy of last year. Tweets are all pro-Gupta, harbouring clear anti-Gordhan, anti-Ramaphosa content.

BLF accounts

Hehehe. Super Linear know what they’re talking about, don’t they? Their study shows how BLF have benefitted from fake support online. Although they are operated by humans (yep, we can call them “trolls”… or “sockpuppets”), they are still likely to spread fake news:

“Most suspended accounts had user-defined locations set to US locations, as they were temporarily ‘rented’ from the international black market, where the main market for their ‘services’ is the US. It is not worth a botnet owner’s time to temporarily repurpose his bot accounts with South African-specific metadata.”

“We similarly see numerous other RET-aligned individuals being retweeted by suspended users with US-based locations, including the BLF (its official account, @Black1stLand1st, that of its leader, @mngxitama, and his blog @BlackOpinion2)”

@WeeklyXpose

These guys surfaced when Cyril Ramaphosa had to confess having an affair in 2017. They actually reported the president was a “blesser”, who showered women with gifts and money – a blatant lie that Ramaphosa outright rejects. But the Kenny Kunene-linked page is also supported by the bot network.

@WMCLeaks

A site that has since been suspended, but poses a danger as its content is still out there in the media. Those behind the page carried out “aggressive surveillance” on BusinessDay’s Peter Bruce, who was harrassed intensely by the BLF last year as well.

@WMCLeaks saw their work published as a “sponsored content” link for South African news outlets. Their Twitter account may be gone, but their untruths still exist:

@LadyAodh

Stay the hell away from this one. We’ve now entered the territory of “far-right” fake accounts, who distribute myths about white genocide and are all too happy to shoehorn the farm murders issue alongside it.

@LadyAodh’s page is full of anti-Muslim, anti-immigration rhetoric. The data from SL describes this account as being a well-known bot, which frequently shares deliberately-misleading information

Elections 2019: Other accounts to “watch out” for

The report also brought-up two very interesting names which are perhaps familiar to South African Twitter users: @AdvBarryRoux, a pro-EFF parody account with satirical political content, and @TumiSole – another EFF fan who is famous for his #CountryDuty tweets.

While these two aren’t fake accounts, Super Linear do identify suspicious activity in terms of who is sharing their content. Both accounts have their entertainment value, but it’s perhaps worth noting they are not fully-verifiable news sources ahead of the Elections 2019 campaign.

“The [high number of] suspended users [retweeting their material] are either regular trolls suspended for their vitriolic content or they are homegrown sockpuppets and bot accounts as opposed to the US-based ones used by the RET faction.”