Fire questions with Kyle Findlay on South Africa Politics

Kyle Findlay is a distinguished social media researcher specializing in combating disinformation in South Africa’s political landscape, with expertise in social network analysis (SNA) and natural language processing (NLP). He is the co-founder of Murmur, a data science consultancy specializing in understanding global social and political landscapes.

The South African had the opportunity to interview Mr. Findlay about his research and his views on the dangers of disinformation on this year’s election in SA.

Tell me a bit about your research and what attracted you to this field?

I’ve been studying and writing about South African politics on social media for over a decade now (since about 2011). First as a hobby; then as a job. South Africa can be a crazy, noisy and confusing place, so I use data to get a bird’s eye view to help me make sense of the chaos.

How has the prevalence of disinformation evolved in the context of the upcoming South African elections, and what specific challenges does it pose to the integrity of the electoral process?

Disinformation started off pretty heavy-handed with the likes of the Guptabots in 2016, which almost certainly consisted of a group of people based in India controlling several hundred fake personas whose sole mandate was to attack critics of the Gupta brothers and the RET faction of
the ANC, especially then-president Jacob Zuma. Since then, influence operations have become more nuanced. Often, it’s less about using bots and sock puppets (two kinds of fake accounts) and more about building hyper-partisan echo chambers of real users who all think the same.

These echo chambers are wielded by specific interest groups to push their agendas and narratives. South Africa’s public discourse will be buffeted by these kinds of communities, which already exist, in the run up to the election. Each echo chamber will shout about their version of reality as loudly as possible to convince journalists in the media and the public how to vote.

Parties will amplify their messages of fear and division to mobilise voters. These messages will relate to issues such as swart gevaar, white monopoly capital, anti-foreigner sentiment, and more. Worst case scenarios will include attempts to undermine faith in the electoral process itself if certain sides lose, like what we’ve seen in the USA.

To what extent are nefarious state actors involved in spreading disinformation and influencing public opinion in the lead-up to the South African elections, and what potential motivations might they have for doing so?

We have many hyper-partisan factions trying to push their version of reality on us. This is not new, politicians and public actors have always tried to use every trick in the book to get us to agree and vote for them. As we get closer to the elections, the shrill tenor and volume of these attempts will only increase but we’ve been subject to them on a daily basis for several years now. The RET faction, which has close ties to Russia, has had at least eight years to perfect their approach in this space. They have recently pivoted their influence machinery to support Jacob Zuma’s MK Party.

The anti-foreigner nationalist movement that started with #PutSouthAfricansFirst and Operation Dudula has been planting its message using inauthentic means since April 2020. While it’s not clear which, if any, international players its aligned with, key beneficiaries of its messaging include ActionSA and RET-offshoot parties, the African Transformation Movement (ATM) and Patriotic Alliance. Whether this is coincidence or not remains to be seen.

Conservative and libertarian white South Africans have been heavily influenced by inauthentically amplified right-wing MAGA (Make America Great Again) narratives since Donald Trump’s ascendency in 2016. Networks of local Muslim organisations with global ties have recently been activated by the Israel-Gaza conflict. All of these influence vectors, and more, will play a role in the coming months.

What measures are being taken by South African authorities to identify and counter disinformation campaigns orchestrated by external actors, and how effective do you believe these measures will be in safeguarding the electoral process?

We are going to have an uphill battle in this regard. We are on the back foot in our defensive strategies. There are many organizations interested in this space in South Africa in civil society, government and private practice (like ourselves). Efforts are being made to bring these networks of practitioners together with some decent results but our challenge will be to move as fast as the actors pushing their inauthentic narratives.

We constantly come up against the question of what can be done in the short term (which often resorts to reactive, whack-a-mole kinds of activities) and what can be done at a more systemic level (policing, platform engagement, law-making, etc.) to make it more difficult for these kinds of actors to persist. It’s an evolutionary arms race.

In what ways can technology and social media platforms contribute to the spread of fake news and online hoaxes during the South African elections, and what strategies can be implemented to mitigate their impact on public perception?

These platforms are the primary vectors for the spread of disinformation. They easily facilitate the creation of hyper-partisan echo chambers whose narratives become homogenized, over-simplified and radicalized. These platforms amplify content as quickly as they can be Liked and shared by users.

Working with platforms to ensure that they encourage users to bust out of their echo chambers (like YouTube did a few years ago by changing its recommendations to include some examples from across the ideological aisle to users) .Such that we can at least agree on common facts, and to limit the spread of highly emotive and harmful content is key. As is cutting off bad actors’ ability to monetize their content. Also, these platforms should be transparent about their moderation activities and more responsive to local organizations that work in this space. To date, there hasn’t been enough of this.

Are there international best practices or lessons learned from other countries that South Africa can adopt to strengthen its defenses against disinformation and ensure a fair and transparent electoral process?

The best examples of combating this have been by countries that exercise a ‘whole of society’ response. Disinformation thrives in polarized societies where hyper-partisan echo chambers have been created by driving messages of fear and anger and where othering and scapegoating
is used to separate citizens from each other. The end result is that users inside echo chambers end up living in alternate realities. Thus, disinformation is a symptom of a disconnected society.

The ways in which we reconnect society is through a recognition of our common humanity (we have more than unites us than divides us), mechanisms that force us to interact and talk to each other (there’s nothing wrong with healthy, robust debate).The shoring up of the Fourth Estate is to ensure that we all agree on the same facts (for example, by investing in free, principled, independent media ecosystems where the truth can thrive).

Finally, teaching our communities about the importance of a healthy skepticism of what they see online, the ways in which bad actors try to divide us, the importance of the democratic project (and how it can only thrive in a united society), etc. are all key. Countries that have done this well include the Nordics, like Finland.

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