3 June 2024, Wired, Vittoria Elliott
“We’ve seen clear campaigns to undermine the [election commission],” says William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), a media and human rights watchdog. “It’s been driven in no small part by [Jacob] Zuma’s daughter.”
In the days following the elections, Zuma-Sambudla has continued to imply that the election was rigged in the ANC’s favor, even though the party lost its long-held parliamentary majority. Bird sees Zuma-Sambudla and her massive platform on X as symptomatic of a larger problem—there’s no one home at the company to curtail content that undermines trust in the elections or threatens election-related violence.
“When Elon took over, he just completely trashed the whole thing,” says Bird. As part of its work, MMA runs a platform called Real411 in collaboration with South Africa’s election commission, known as the IEC. The platform allows regular South Africans to report instances of mis- and disinformation around the election. MMA can then flag these pieces of content to Meta, TikTok, and Google, all of which work with the IEC to protect elections. X, according to Bird, “didn’t want to engage” in conversations to help shape digital and social media guidelines for elections on the continent during 2024 and 2025.
“That’s not just one small country, South Africa,” says Bird. “That was the entire continent that they refused to engage with.”