Researchers say they need better access to social media data to catch disinformation
South Africa lacks appropriate policies around misinformation and elections, as well as access to social media data that would enable researchers to flag disinformation and fake news, two experts have said.
Zubeida Dawood, a cybersecurity expert at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and Vukosi Marivate, a data scientist at the University of Pretoria, addressed the media on 19 March ahead of the country’s general election in May.
They said that updated regulations and open data are needed so that South Africa can monitor harmful online behaviour and develop local artificial intelligence technologies to help safeguard elections.
Dawood said the current boom in AI technology was making it easier to spread and hide disinformation, for instance through deepfake videos that mimic politicians.
On the other hand, AI can be used to combat fake news through automated fact-checking, identifying manipulated media and analysing language, she said.
She added that cybersecurity crimes, to which misinformation and disinformation contribute, cost South Africa about 2.2 billion rand (US$117 million) annually.
Language barriers
Marivate cautioned that new data access rules on social media platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, make it more difficult to analyse and moderate potentially harmful content created by users and by AI “bots”. In addition, most tools for automated content moderation work only for English content.
This is especially problematic in South Africa, he said, because content in local languages is used to spread false information online.
If researchers do not get more access to South African social media data, they will not be able to develop monitoring tools that work for African languages and in other local contexts, he added.
Election security
Dawood said that fake news can lead to distrust in the government, a polarised society, violence and panic.
“We are lacking policy work around elections and misinformation, which is problematic. But the good news is that we do have sanctions in place, so there will be penalties out there for people who do malicious things,” she said.
Dawood also said that because things move so fast online, constant cybersecurity training is vital. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is actively developing public digital literacy and cybersecurity skills, including among poll workers and officials at the Electoral Commission of South Africa, she said.