On Thursday 8 October, anti-migrant protests in Durban and Soweto turned violent. Police reported 24 vehicles torched and foreign-owned shops were looted in both cities. By Saturday the army had been deployed to Durban, a grim reminder of the 2021 unrest that rocked the city and caused billions of rands of damage. Government spokesperson William Baloyi was direct about the cause: people spreading deliberately false information about a Constitutional Court ruling on asylum processing.
The ConCourt ruling itself was not incendiary, finding that certain barriers to lodging an asylum claim had to be removed. The version that reached the streets was something else entirely: proof of open borders and a government siding with foreigners against its own citizens. That narrative did not appear overnight. Anti-migrant movements had spent most of the year, and arguably the better part of a decade, building it online.
The way xenophobic misinformation spreads, is instructive. A decade ago, most South Africans would have encountered a ConCourt ruling through a newspaper, a radio bulletin or the evening news, with a trusted journalist explaining what it meant. Those voices still exist, and they still carry weight with the readers and listeners who seek them out. But they now compete in a crowded online space alongside WhatsApp voice notes, short video clips and accounts with large followings and no editorial obligations. Social media has made it easy to spread information to vast groups of people – whether it be open to public scrutiny or closed to members only. In that space, speed and emotion count for more than context. AI has made this problem even worse, with convincing fake images and videos stoking the worst of humanity’s instincts.
A careful explainer or debunking published the following morning or the next week reaches a fraction of the people who saw the original claim, if it reaches them at all.
This ability for instant misinformation, based on snap judgements and absent facts, is now part of the world’s social fabric.
It affects individuals, the private sector and the state. Malicious and ill-informed actors look for short-lived crisis moments to build instant engagement: an accident, a court ruling, a leaked document, a service failure. Before there is opportunity to respond in a measured and accurate way, the gap is filled by whoever speaks first. Gathering facts take time, gossip travels at light speed.
Over time, perhaps as a society we will learn how to treat the increasingly weaponised online misinformation, or will find measured ways to safeguard against the worst outcomes.
But in the meantime, there is a lesson for truth in the way misinformation spreads. Consistent communication over time creates a public record and builds trust. It works through volume: truths and behaviours repeated by trusted accounts over months and years, building a fact pattern that is hard to dislodge by malicious actors in the heat of the moment. Regularly defining and positioning an organisation’s own point of view on social media and, when appropriate through traditional media, builds a record of what it does and why. Accumulated, they become the reference point that journalists, regulators, communities and customers return to when a claim needs checking.
In a crowded online space, the truth does not win by default. It wins when there is enough of it, repeated often enough and in enough places, that a false claim runs into something solid. The people behind this month’s violence understood that volume over time shifts perception; they have been applying that lesson all year.
An organisation that has built its case the same way, consistently but based in truth, gives trusted voices something to point to when the noise starts. If not, leaves an organisation open to whoever is first and loudest.
– Gerhard Mulder
Account Director