The Growing Threat of Disinformation in the Digital Age

Disinformation—deliberate falsehoods spread online—has become a significant threat to democracies worldwide, exploiting an information ecosystem that “prioritises what is popular over what is true” to cause widespread harm.

The fundamental issue lies in how political discourse unfolds on platforms designed for viral advertising, according to Renée DiResta, research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. “Social media algorithms will show you what you want to see, but they don’t have any kind of value judgment, and this is where we see things like radicalisation becoming an increasing problem because the recommendation engine does not actually understand what it is suggesting.”

While foreign influence operations from countries like Russia and increasingly China receive substantial attention, domestic disinformation presents an equally serious challenge. The 2020 edition of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation identified 77 countries where government or political actors deployed disinformation on social media to manipulate public opinion. Most of these campaigns operate domestically, researchers told Africa Check.

Among these countries are 12 African nations, including South Africa, where government agencies, politicians, parties, private contractors, citizens, and influencers engage in social media manipulation. Tactics range from attacking opposition parties to silencing critics through coordinated trolling campaigns.

Notable examples include the African National Congress’s pre-election “boiler room,” which reportedly mobilized party activists to target opposition leaders on Twitter, and the Economic Freedom Fighters’ “troll army” that focused on journalists. According to Amelie Henle, research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the Gupta-backed influence operation involving the now-defunct British PR firm Bell Pottinger represents the largest disinformation campaign identified in South Africa in recent years.

Such campaigns ultimately undermine democracy itself. University of Washington associate professor Kate Starbird explains: “While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective—for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy—pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.”

Camille François, chief innovation officer at network analysis company Graphika, breaks down online disinformation into three interconnected “vectors”: manipulative actors, deceptive behavior, and harmful content.

Manipulative actors typically hide their identities and intentions, using sock-puppet accounts with false identities and trolls who intimidate those questioning the veracity of information. These actors often have diverse motives, including financial gain, tribal online affiliation, or influencing public opinion.

The financial motive was evident when a South African municipal employee posed as a racist white woman on Twitter in 2020 to drive traffic to his websites. Political influence was the clear objective of the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) disinformation campaign on South African Twitter in 2016-2017, which sought to undermine economic institutions and divert attention from state capture accusations.

Analysis of over 200,000 RET network tweets revealed that 98% were retweets, demonstrating how fake accounts amplified messages “to give the illusion that the content they are sharing resonates with a wider group.” The RET community remains active on South African Twitter, having merged with Economic Freedom Fighters supporters and displacing “the mainstream media from the centre of the conversation,” according to data analysis from the Superlinear blog.

Deceptive behaviors employed by disinformation actors include coordinated inauthentic activity to artificially inflate the perceived support for particular messages. In January 2021, both Twitter and Facebook removed accounts linked to Uganda’s ICT ministry for such behavior ahead of the country’s election. Tactics included using “fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users and re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were.”

The Oxford Internet Institute identified 58 countries where “cyber troops”—government or political party actors—deployed bots to manipulate public opinion, while human-run fake accounts were used in 81 countries. South African cyber troops utilized bots, fake human-run accounts, and hacked or stolen profiles.

Disinformation campaigns typically span multiple platforms, often beginning in anonymous online spaces before moving through closed groups like WhatsApp, then to conspiracy communities on Reddit or YouTube, and finally reaching open networks like Twitter. Media amplification often follows, especially if politicians or influencers repeat the falsehoods.

The content itself takes many forms, from photos used out of context to completely fabricated material. Visual elements like memes, misleading infographics, and “evidence collages” that compile information from multiple sources into a single, shareable image are commonly employed. Content designed to trigger emotional responses—particularly fear or anger—proves especially effective.

As DiResta reminds us: in an information war, our minds are the territory. “If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.”