On March 9, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma, tweeted a video which was intended to show former US President Donald Trump encouraging “all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto WeSizwe”, his father’s party, in the country’s May 29 election. In another post just days before the election, Zuma-Sambudla, who has more than 300,000 followers, shared videos and photos of what appeared to be ballot papers. The accompanying text accused the African National Congress (ANC), the party currently leading the government, of stealing votes. that post It has been viewed almost 650,000 times.
Experts who spoke to WIRED say that X, formerly Twitter, was a major source of election-related misinformation and disinformation in the run-up to the vote, leading to dealt a heavy blow to the ANC. And Zuma-Sambudla was a super spreader.
“We have seen clear campaigns to undermine the (election commission),” says William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), a media and human rights watchdog. “It’s been largely driven by (Jacob) Zuma’s daughter.”
In the days following the elections, Zuma-Sambudla has continued imply that the election was rigged in favor of the ANC, despite the party losing its long-held parliamentary majority. Bird sees Zuma-Sambudla and her massive platform on
“When Elon took over, he completely destroyed it,” Bird says. As part of its work, MMA runs a platform called Real411 in collaboration with South Africa’s electoral commission, known as IEC. The platform allows regular South Africans to report cases of misinformation and disinformation surrounding the elections. MMA can then flag these contents on Meta, TikTok and Google, all of which work with the IEC to protect elections. X, according to Bird, “didn’t want to engage in” conversations to help shape guidelines for social and digital networks for elections on the continent during 2024 and 2025.
“South Africa is not just a small country,” says Bird. “That was the entire continent they refused to interact with.”
Following the insurrection in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the company then known as Twitter reinforced the trust and safety of its staff – the people who keep hate speech, misinformation, and illegal content off the platform ) around the elections, to ensure that their platform could not be used to foment civil unrest. In the lead-up to the US midterm elections and the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, the company was particularly alert to misinformation and disinformation that questioned the electoral process or the validity of an election result. (Brazil, like the United States, also experienced an insurrection in the months after the defeat of then-president Jair Bolsonaro.) However, after Elon Musk took over the company, he fired most of the people working in trust and security. As part of this, all Twitter Africa staff were laid off.
