On March 9, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma, tweeted a video that purported to point out former US president Donald Trump encouraging “all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto WeSizwe,” her father’s celebration, within the nation’s Could 29 elections. In one other put up, simply days earlier than the elections, Zuma-Sambudla, who has greater than 300,000 followers, shared movies and images of what seemed to be paper ballots. The accompanying textual content accused the African Nationwide Congress (ANC), the celebration presently main the federal government, of stealing votes. That put up has been seen practically 650,000 occasions.
Specialists who spoke to WIRED say that X, previously Twitter, was a significant supply of election-related mis- and disinformation within the lead-up to the vote, which dealt a significant blow to the ANC. And Zuma-Sambudla was a super-spreader.
“We’ve seen clear campaigns to undermine the [election commission],” says William Chook, director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), a media and human rights watchdog. “It has been pushed in no small half by [Jacob] Zuma’s daughter.”
Within the days following the elections, Zuma-Sambudla has continued to indicate that the election was rigged within the ANC’s favor, regardless that the celebration misplaced its long-held parliamentary majority. Chook sees Zuma-Sambudla and her large platform on X as symptomatic of a bigger downside—there’s nobody residence on the firm to curtail content material that undermines belief within the elections or threatens election-related violence.
“When Elon took over, he simply utterly trashed the entire thing,” says Chook. As a part of its work, MMA runs a platform known as Real411 in collaboration with South Africa’s election fee, often known as the IEC. The platform permits common South Africans to report situations of mis- and disinformation across the election. MMA can then flag these items of content material to Meta, TikTok, and Google, all of which work with the IEC to guard elections. X, in accordance with Chook, “didn’t wish to interact” in conversations to assist form digital and social media pointers for elections on the continent throughout 2024 and 2025.
“That is not only one small nation, South Africa,” says Chook. “That was the whole continent that they refused to have interaction with.”
Following the riot in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the corporate then often known as Twitter beefed up its belief and security employees—the individuals preserving hate speech, disinformation, and unlawful content material off the platform—round elections, to make sure that its platform couldn’t be used to foment civil unrest. Within the lead-up to the US midterm elections and the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections, the corporate was notably vigilant round mis- and disinformation that questioned the electoral course of or the validity of an election’s end result. (Brazil, just like the US, additionally noticed an riot within the months following then president Jair Bolsonaro’s loss). After Elon Musk took over the corporate, nevertheless, he laid off most people engaged on belief and security. As a part of this, the whole Twitter Africa employees was lower.
