By Thapelo Molefe
The spread of fake news and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated political content is raising concerns ahead of South Africa’s 4 November local government elections, with experts warning that misleading information could confuse voters and undermine confidence in the country’s democracy.
The warning came during a virtual roundtable hosted by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) on Wednesday.
Researchers, fact-checkers, media monitors and communications specialists discussed ways to combat misinformation during elections.
Africa Check deputy chief editor Cayley Clifford cautioned against focusing exclusively on AI-generated material, saying much of the false information circulating in South Africa involved genuine photographs and videos shared out of context.
“South Africa’s disinformation landscape is doing just fine, thriving even, without AI and most of what we see circulating when it comes to false information is not artificially generated,” Clifford said.
“It is real videos and images that have been shared out of context.”
She said such content could be particularly convincing because the images and videos were genuine, making it difficult for people to recognise how they were being used to mislead the public.
Clifford acknowledged that AI-generated content was also circulating, including fabricated political polls and images that could mislead voters about the level of support for particular parties.
CSIR principal AI specialist Avi Moodley said the growing volume of online content was making it increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between genuine information and material generated using AI.
“There’s infinite content. You don’t know what’s real. You don’t know what’s AI generated,” Moodley said.
He warned that advances in AI had helped industrialise the spread of misinformation by enabling the rapid creation and amplification of emotionally charged narratives.
“We haven’t seen this in the previous elections to the extent that we will see it going forward,” he said.
Tom Pwachi, a researcher at the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change, cited examples of AI-generated political content circulated during the 2024 national and provincial elections.
These included a fake video of US President Donald Trump urging South Africans to vote for the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party and another video falsely showing former US president Joe Biden threatening to impose sanctions on South Africa if the African National Congress won the election.
The examples illustrated how fabricated content could be used to influence political debate and spread misleading claims during an election period.
GCIS deputy director-general Michael Curran said government needed to work with other institutions and the public to ensure voters had access to accurate information.
“We must strengthen our ability to identify emerging narratives earlier in the process, communicate verified information quickly and coordinate our responses from across all institutions of the state,” Curran said.
He urged citizens to take responsibility for verifying information before sharing it.
“We should encourage everyone to pause, check, and then verify the source of information before you just share it along the line,” he said.
Curran said the aim was to ensure citizens had access to reliable information on which to base their decisions when electing municipal representatives.
The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) is also working to address election-related misinformation through its collaboration with Moxii Africa and the Real411 reporting platform.
Moxii Africa programme manager for community building and engagement Ntsako Mangayi said Real411 allowed members of the public to report misinformation and other online harms linked to the upcoming elections.
“Real 411 is a platform to report misinformation or online harms for the upcoming elections which are taking place next week,” Mangayi said.
He said the platform had received numerous complaints about election-related misinformation and online harms following the announcement of the partnership between Moxii Africa, Real411 and the IEC.
The complaints included allegations of misinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence and harassment.
Mangayi warned that misleading content could spread faster than it could be reported and removed, underscoring the importance of journalists verifying information and sharing fact-checking findings with the public.
He said the platform was preparing for an increase in complaints in the days leading up to the election.
Moodley said the CSIR was developing an Informed Fake News Advisor to assess information against credible sources and trace its origins, helping fact-checkers identify potentially misleading content.
The organisation is also developing technology to search audio more quickly. Moodley said this could help address the challenges posed by South Africa’s linguistic diversity and the growing use of audio and video to spread misinformation online.
The CSIR is using the local government elections to test some of its technologies as it prepares for future national elections.
Tales of Turning founder and director Jenna Lee Stragnell said tackling disinformation and hate speech required cooperation among organisations monitoring online conversations.
She said the organisation shared information openly to support collaboration and help identify how misleading narratives were created and amplified.
The roundtable speakers called for stronger collaboration among the IEC, government, researchers, fact-checkers, media organisations and citizens to protect the integrity of the electoral process.
They urged voters to verify the sources of political claims before sharing them, particularly during the election period, when misleading content can spread rapidly online.
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