I’m going to ask your indulgence and return to the topic of last week’s column, which was about some of the stupid, hurtful things people seem to feel they have the right to spew out on social media.
This week, though, I want to examine how the response on X to my sharing of last week’s column can teach us a few lessons about how social media not only destroys traditional media’s ability to engage with people in a thoughtful, complex way, but also allows for a greater degree of manipulation of the information ecosystem.
In fact, “traditional media” might now be one of those terms, like “fake news” and “free speech”, that has become so debased in the digital public sphere that it has undergone semantic bleaching — when a word’s original, specific meaning gradually loses its power over time. A good example is “awesome”, which once meant to inspire awe or fear, but now is used to describe anything from tasty ice cream to a nice pair of shoes.
“Traditional media” used to refer to the forms of mass media that existed before the rise of the internet. Now, it sort of means any media (including digital) that attempts to produce objective journalism based on evidence, as opposed to the amateurish, compromised journalism of much of the rest of the digital sphere.
To be clear, I’m not evoking some sort of prelapsarian past here. Journalism has been immensely strengthened by the advent of the internet, and especially the way it has broken down the elitism of old-school media houses by introducing diversity into news.
But this has come at some cost to citizens, and to the robustness of the information space in general. The 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report (to which I contribute) launches on June 17, and it’s embargoed until then. But I think I can risk a small leak of the results and tell you that when South Africans were asked if they were concerned about what is real and what is fake when it comes to online news, they were extremely pessimistic. In fact, we’re up in the top three most concerned of the 48 countries surveyed, with Nigeria and Kenya scoring highly as well.
It’s not difficult to see why we’re so worried. The news ecosystem is a mess. Let’s take the example of my column last week. I decided to push it on X. Normally, this entails copying a relevant bit and posting it with a link.
So I posted this excerpt: “In the world of blinkered racism inhabited by The Kiffness and his oppressed white followers, apartheid was a beautiful dream, created by white people and ruined by black people,” accompanied by a bit of editorialising about how stupid this attitude was.
The actual column was a reaction to something that The Kiffness — real name David Scott — said in response to one of his followers, who had posted: “Apartheid was not based on the persecution of blacks, it was an attempt at allowing them to develop on their own esteem and at the pace of their ability.” Scott’s reply was: “I think that was supposed to be the original intention — ‘good fences make good neighbours’. But let’s be honest, it didn’t end up very good.”
In response to my post, Scott posted this: “The former editor-in-chief of Mail & Guardian thinks that if you don’t approve of laws that punish you for your skin colour, it means you want apartheid back. Make it make sense.” (And of course, tagging the M&G, where I last worked more than 10 years ago, is a dog whistle to those who take joy in slavering about the evils of mainstream media.)
You can imagine the replies I got from that little misquote, which ranged from threats of doxing to the usual accusations of being an ANC lapdog (“Apparently Chris gets paid by the ANC. It’s his job to discredit the whites. Don’t let him fool you”).
My reply to Scott was: “No. That wasn’t in my column at all. Maybe read it. What I wrote was, anyone who thinks apartheid was about ‘good fences build good neighbours’ is really not getting the concept of apartheid. And certainly not the reality.” As the argument progressed, I tried to insist that we discuss what I actually said in the column. Scott replied: “It’s behind a paywall … I read perfectly clearly what you wrote here though!”
It’s almost like South Africans have forgotten that they have a robust media environment
This is a structural issue that all news organisations are faced with. If we are going to push our longer form content on short-form social media, but only make it available to subscribers, how are we going to stop trolls from manipulating our arguments, from reducing them to hot takes?
Perhaps more crucially, how do you provide your supporters with all the information they need to fight your corner? In this case, I asked the FM digital editor to take my column out from behind the registration paywall for 24 hours, but this is only a stopgap. And not one that you can employ on a regular basis.
It’s worth pointing out that I did not say in my column that if you don’t approve of broad-based BEE laws, it means you want apartheid back. Because I categorically don’t believe that, though there are crazy outliers, as there always are on all sides of a debate. What I denounced as “stupid” is the portrayal of apartheid as just a way to build good neighbours and the glossing over of its evils.
This is one of the examples of how social media has broken journalism. Dozens of people (the post had more than 55,000 views) were attacking me for having said something I hadn’t actually written. They were happy to take Scott’s misprision of my short tweet as the truth.
It’s almost like South Africans have forgotten that they have a robust media environment. I could hardly believe a recent tweet from the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), which pushed a Sputnik Africa story headlined: “Sputnik is ‘Voice of the Voiceless’: Chief of SANDF”.
Yes, Gen Rudzani Maphwanya told Sputnik Africa: “This is an avenue that will now be open for all of us to get objective reporting that is not biased, reporting of things as they happened. That is now going to be the voice of the voiceless. Because most of the time there are perceptions created by distorting truth. I’m very excited that we will have a voice that will at least articulate the plight of the people ... undistorted.”
Sputnik’s blurb read: “He expressed optimism about the opening of Sputnik offices in Africa, highlighting the importance of truthful, undistorted storytelling that represents the realities of the people.”
I can’t beat the response from African Defence Review’s Darren Olivier, who wrote: “For the chief of the SANDF to call Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news agency notorious for propaganda, the ‘voice of the voiceless’ shows a serious lack of political judgment, awareness, and common sense ... He should know better.”
Why would General Ignorance (as I’m sure he is nicknamed by his unfortunate troops), who serves a country that ranks 27th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index, think we need a propaganda outlet from a country ranked 164th to give a voice to our voiceless? It’s insane. Mind you, this is the same SANDF that, City Press reports, has just erected memorial plaques for soldiers who died on foreign missions, and managed to get names and details wrong.
Ultimately, my little imbroglio with The Kiffness and his angry followers shows — and this is hardly breaking news — that there is a lot of work to be done in bridging the chasm between a reasoned argument in a news publication and how it lands on social media. News organisations do need some sort of subscription model, because they need to produce expensive news. But how do we — and that includes all of us who believe in evidence-based truth — maintain the integrity of our information ecosystem when we have people eager to distort the truth for their own ends?
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