South Africa’s political discourse is robust and relatively diverse. However, this ideological diversity tends to stick within well-defined echo chambers (that often align along racial lines). The white body politic consists of many sub-groups that span the gamut from Far Left to Far Right, and it’s the Far Right that …
It’s become somewhat of a tradition for me to throw all the Twitter datasets that I’ve looked at throughout the year together into a single mega dataset to create a meta-analysis of the South African political landscape (see my analyses for mid-2016, the end of 2016, and 2018). My 2020 …
I worry that a xenophobic flare up is imminent in South Africa. The flames have been fanned for the past few months and we’re poised to reap the bitter harvest. There’s a hashtag that’s been bubbling just under the surface of many Twitter communities that is being used to marshal …
It’s been a while. This is my first post since June 2019. Needless to say, life has been hectic, but whose isn’t? To make up for it, here’s a quick post on how South African Twitter reacted to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2020 State of the Nation Address (SONA). As a …
To the best of my knowledge, South Africa has not experienced as obvious an attempt to affect our national discourse as that of the Guptabots which started in mid-2016 and ran up until their faction lost at the ANC 54th electoral conference at the end of 2017. However, a small …
Steve Biko is a towering figure in the South African mythos. Biko used his voice to communicate ideas about race and power in 1960s and 1970s Apartheid South Africa. The ideas he so eloquently articulated had been moulded by a young, black intelligentsia centred around the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and these ideas made core ideological contributions to South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, of which Biko was a leader.
As with the rest of the world these days, South Africa is caught in a bittersweet feedback loop between its mainstream politics and what happens on Twitter. Sweet because platforms like Twitter democratise access to political debates; bitter because such platforms also provide an avenue for bad actors to spread …
I worked with Ferial Haffajee at the Daily Maverick to quantify and visualise how EFF & RET talking points, often grounded in heresy, permeated discussions around Pravin Gordhan. You can read the full article here. It included images like these:
South Africans need to be extremely vigilant in the upcoming 2019 general elections which are fast approaching. We’ve already seen how local actors such as the Guptabots have effectively changed our national conversations. There’s no reason to believe that this won’t continue to happen in the next election, as it …
The website FiveThirtyEight (made famous by its founder, Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the 2012 US elections down to the state level) recently released a dataset of almost three million tweets authored by Russian sockpuppet accounts. The dataset was collated by academics, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, of Clemson University. …
