At 2.03pm on August 24, hostilities erupted on Twitter between former MP Phumzile van Damme and her erstwhile employer, the DA. Those invested in the more prurient side of political commentary will probably be interested in the way the internal dynamics in the DA are revealed, and use the exchange to conjure up pro-or anti-DA narratives. But the really interesting revelation is about how all political parties might view their relationships with the dominant social media platforms, and how much they think those platforms can influence election outcomes.
Van Damme’s first tweet read as follows: "Right, I was going to do this. I see [DA leader John Steenhuisen] has lied to the media about why I resigned from the DA. I was going to leave this. The day I resigned, I was told by the chief whip [Natasha] Mazzone to lay off Facebook. I could not do that & compromise my values so I resigned."
Her outburst was apparently caused by Steenhuisen claiming she had resigned so as to follow her husband to Norway, something Van Damme categorically denied. Instead, she claimed she left the party because it was reluctant to call Facebook to account as combatively as she had wanted.
"I was not going to engage in this. I said when I resigned — leave me alone, I will leave you alone. I’ve literally been minding my business. You wanted me not to go after Facebook because it might affect the parties’ [sic] votes. I said no."
I would relegate this all to the "politicians being politicians" bin, as it’s pretty typical of the sort of spats we know politicians engage in. One doesn’t want to read too much into these sorts of exchanges, as they’re often leaked or revealed to score some sort of obscure internal point. And even though Van Damme is no longer a practising politician, it’s clear she still has political clout.
Where this spat differs, though, is the particular mention of Facebook in the WhatsApp conversation between Van Damme and Mazzone. This apparently took place just before Van Damme was to release a statement to the media about her crusade to get Facebook to appear before parliament, to be questioned about its strategies around election misinformation in SA.
According to the WhatsApp messages Van Damme posted, Mazzone had said: "We do not want to escalate into a fight with Facebook. They are our biggest social media apparatus and it’s a fight we will not win. The statement is aggressive and not good for future relationships. They are incredibly good at taking down offensive posts, closing fake accounts etc. There are also many downstream firms that are dependent on Facebook."
Van Damme responded: "Your assessment is quite wrong Natasha. It is not how Facebook works. It won’t stop working with the DA."
At first glance, this could read as a political party selling out to Big Tech, and I’m sure many of us would sympathise with Van Damme’s position. It is undeniably true that the big social media platforms appear to have untrammelled licence to do whatever they find commercially and ideologically expedient, a state of affairs that almost all governments believe cannot continue.
That most of the big platforms in Africa are US-owned adds an extra, near-colonial dimension to their virtual (I use the word in two senses) monopolisation of online discourse.
The route from meme to murder can be drastically short, and we’re going to need to be hypervigilant in the weeks preceding our elections
But equally, many of us would sympathise with the DA. The social media platforms are not going away and, like it or not, they seem to have a huge amount of influence on elections.
Perhaps a better way of putting the point is that political parties, agents of misinformation and random contrarians who know how to use social media can generate influence and impact. Which means we need to find ways to work with social media that don’t compromise us ethically.
People are fond of saying that social media support doesn’t equate with real world support. None other than the mighty Julius S Malema, for example, once said: "I also hasten to point out that Twitter is entirely divorced from reality: I know for a fact that the EFF won nearly every ‘poll’ conducted on Twitter in the run-up to the elections. It ultimately lost the elections and came third."
Of course, I also hasten to point out that Malema was defending himself against a hate speech lawsuit at the time, after the SA National Editors’ Forum and others accused him and the EFF of creating an enabling environment for their supporters to threaten and intimidate journalists.
But the truth is, social media can influence elections, though to what degree is a different question with different answers dependent on the environment.
We’re all pretty familiar with the consensus around the 2016 US elections, which is that Russian influence operations played a large part in getting Donald Trump elected.
Right after the elections, in November 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ridiculed the idea that social media could have had any effect, and was quoted by The Guardian newspaper in the UK as calling it "a pretty crazy idea" and saying voters "make decisions based on their lived experience".
Fast-forward to December 2017, and he’d changed his tune. "After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea [that] misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive."
It’s that final comment that resonates. The role that social media plays in the SA political world is not ever going to be susceptible to a simple binary of good or bad.
But while we’re waiting for the world to sort out how it’s going to regulate social media, we need to work out how to moderate the very real negatives of social media, and how to take advantage of its many positives.
It’s too important an issue to be dismissive about, which is why focusing on the DA would be unhelpful.
Let me add, in the spirit of disclosure (as well as a bit of marketing), that for the upcoming local government elections in SA, the organisation I work for (Code for Africa) is part of a coalition of organisations and individuals who work on misinformation and disinformation. It’s an entirely nonpartisan network, of which Van Damme is a member.
Social media’s role in SA politics is never going to be susceptible to a simple binary of good or bad
— What it means:
In different capacities, we will be monitoring all political narratives in the months before the election, highlighting misinformation and disinformation where applicable, and providing citizens with the information and tools they need to inform their own decision-making.
We’ll also be making media monitoring platforms available to newsrooms that need it, so that they can create their own watch lists and analyses.
Happily, there are many other organisations in SA, from newsrooms to civil society organisations, also working on the problems of misinformation and disinformation. Those terms sound relatively benign, but they’re shorthand for other, darker manifestations of social media abuse, such as hate speech, xenophobia, gender-based violence, homophobia and all the other dangerous trappings of our uncivil societies. The route from meme to murder can be a drastically short one sometimes, and we’re all going to need to be hyper-vigilant in the weeks preceding our elections.
The medium-term goal must be to moderate the powers of the big technology monoliths, but our short-term goal is to use the structures of social media against itself.
After all, as Zamaswazi Majozi — the radical economic transformation influencer allegedly behind the Sphithiphithi Evaluator social media account — has found out, after being arrested by the Hawks, Twitter gives you a canvas on which to paint incitement to violence, but it’s also a rather handy way of exposing the people who choose to sow division and disinformation.
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