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. …
This blog usually focuses on South African subjects because there are enough analysts and armchair commentators talking about the shitshow that is American politics at the moment. Be that as it may, I couldn’t stop myself from diving into the dataset of 2,973,371 tweets relating to Russian inteference recently released by …
[Note that the caption for the image at the top of this page should read “A campaign to raise awareness on farm murders. Photo: Twitter/Marius Müller” Source: eNCA. For some reason, WordPress won’t let me add a caption to this image] This is a difficult article to write, mostly because the …
Winnie Mandela – activist, freedom fighter, advocate for violent resistance, possible accessory to murder, mother, wife, philanthropist, iconoclast – died on the 2nd of April 2018. She left behind her a monumental but muddied legacy of fearless activism and fierce confrontation that spans the full arch of the Apartheid period, …
I had recently looked up the ‘Winnie’ documentary out of interest. While the documentary left me thinking, it did not resonate with me in the way that it has on Twitter over the past few days. If you haven’t seen it, The Daily Maverick has a good summary of its …
Like many South Africans, a copy of, Jacques Pauw’s, sensational exposé, “The President’s Keepers“, found its way unbidden onto my phone towards the end of 2017. The book details former-president Jacob Zuma’s corrupt shadow state. Just a week after its release, the State Security Agency (SSA) threatened to have it …
A milestone occurred in our country in December 2017 at the ANC54 national elective conference. We took a major step towards recovering from the massive-scale, state capture project that has slowly bled our country dry for the past decade when Cyril Ramaphosa was chosen as the new president of the …
