If you’re one of the 69% of South Africans who get their news from social media and video networks every week (significantly, if not scarily, above the global average of 54%), you would have been horrified to learn that President Cyril Ramaphosa has put the fate of our children into the hands of a Muslim terrorist.
Nay, worse than that, he has betrayed the nation by appointing a foreigner who has obvious ties to Isis (just look at his turban!) and will be unleashing jihad on the rest of Africa when he’s finished with South Africa.
If you’re also one of the 67% of South Africans who, according to the 2026 Reuters Digital News Report, say they are worried about identifying what is real and what is fake online, you’ll probably have worked out that this is all deranged nonsense and clickbait. And if not by those who are consumed by hate, then by disinformation profiteers with no ethical codes who are making money out of generating anger and division.
We are, of course, talking about the online reaction to last week’s news that the DA’s Yusuf Cassim has been appointed deputy minister of higher education & training. You might wonder what the point is of surfacing this bile excreted by the bottom feeders of the information ecosystem. Shouldn’t we just ignore it? After all, who is really going to take @Teboho_Afrique seriously when they tweet: “This kak government wants anarchy. No muslim alien must be allowed in SA government, there are no Basotho or Zulus occupying government positions in Muslim countries.”
The problem with just rolling your eyes and moving on is that it rather depends on everyone doing so. There are different ways of describing what happened. A News24 headline seems to encapsulate the relevant points accurately as “DA condemns ‘xenophobic and Islamophobic’ attacks on Yusuf Cassim”. But one reason foreign states and other bad actors flood the information space with hate speech and Islamophobia is to provide the tools and content that allow other actors to push their own adjacent agendas.
In this case it’s stoking Islamophobia, but it could be anything from kicking out foreigners and attacking journalists to vaccine or climate change denialism
These agendas are not mysterious. In this case it’s stoking Islamophobia, but it could be anything from kicking out foreigners and attacking journalists to vaccine or climate change denialism. What they have in common is that they are all designed to generally weaken trust, and especially trust in governments, the media and fact-based systems.
Stoking division online helps foreign states by polarising our political and social landscape. The ultimate goal is to weaken trust in institutions and complicate domestic or foreign policy debates so that there appears to be no clear-cut truth. You’ve seen this happen with the genocide in Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and our own March to Moron movement.
It suits foreign states and local political actors to push our society into an us vs them way of thinking, to lay the groundwork for distracting from other political and strategic imperatives. They want to create the impression that we are divided, or at least exacerbate our existing divisions, so as to suit their own influence operations. And crucially, they want to launder their own policies and framings through legitimate platforms.
So in contrast to the News24 headline, and others like it that focus on this as an example of Islamophobia, TheCable newspaper in Nigeria — a country smarting from South African xenophobia — runs the headline “‘Visionless president’ — outrage as Ramaphosa appoints Indian-South African as deputy minister”, which does not capture what this nonsense was about and instead frames the appointment of Cassim as a political problem.
What started as imbeciles spouting hatred and xenophobia on social media has been laundered into legacy media, legitimising the misinformation and hate speech.
Leadership Nigeria has a similar headline: “Ramaphosa faces backlash over appointment of Indian‑South African”. The next step is to launder that narrative back onto social media, now washed clean of the craziness of the original Islamophobia. It’s not even as if this needs to happen consciously, though there are case studies of apparent collusion between foreign states and media outlets to engage in laundering.
This is an uncomfortable information space to live in, where truth is negotiable and, worse, fungible. Hate speech and misinformation are extremely personal for those targeted, resulting in serious real-world harms. Distressingly, they are also just a currency in the economy of disinformation, and one which we have no option but to trade in.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.