I contributed a chapter to the South African Disinformation Project‘s report on last year’s Local Government Elections which was released in January 2022. These elections were a watershed for South Africa in a few ways: The hegemony of the ruling ANC party has been severely challenged and many believe it’s …
My collaborator, Thembani Phaweni, and I have been visualising the State Capture Inquiry’s reports as they’ve been released. You can read about the first visualisation here. Below is a breakdown of what the second report looks like as a network visualisation (technically a ‘named entity co-occurence network‘). Data visualisation is …
Data visualisation can be a useful way of making sense of complex topics. Over the past few years, Thembani Phaweni and I have taken to visualising important state capture documents as networks that show the main entities, and clusters of entities involved. We’ve done it for Thuli Madonsela’s State of …
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 …
[UPDATE: I recorded a YouTube video that summarises the main take-aways from this article. Check it out] 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 …
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:
