There is a malevolent power in misinformation and disinformation.
If nations don’t soon learn that lesson and enforce curbs on misinformation, disinformation and hate speech, we will start to see more xenophobic riots, such as the #UKRiots in England and Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, these riots began after the tragic and senseless murder of three little girls.
The spark that started these riots was misinformation spread online that the perpetrator of the crime was an asylum seeker. South Africa is not immune to this phenomenon, having recently survived our very own serious and deadly riots in 2021. We are also known for a series of periodic xenophobic riots and unrest over the years. In all these instances, social media was a powerful organising tool.
Kurt Vonnegut compared hate to a powerful drug, intoxicating in its intensity, and unfortunately, our globalised society turns many into addicts. In South Africa, as in the UK, many people take issue with immigration, often conflating the failures of the government with migrants being here. Politicians and the media use this to raise their popularity and distract from their failures. Couple this with the misinformation and disinformation wheel on social media that thrives on lies and deception, we have the UK Riots of 2024, where migrants are the enemy to be disposed of, violently if necessary.
There has been concern about the spread of hate speech across all social media platforms. There have been extensive reports written about how hate speech is spreading at a rapid rate and how governments are failing to catch up when it comes to policies and laws. This makes the space of social media kind of similar to the Wild West, where there are a group of people who are a law unto themselves. The far-right movement has found a niche audience online and it has been the perfect haven to spread their pernicious hate, sometimes anonymously, but most times loudly and boldly.
Xenophobia, coupled with racism and enabled by those in power, equals a recipe for disaster. In the UK, politicians fuelled the tensions that existed when it came to the issue of immigration. Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was responsible for the reprehensible Rwanda bill that was set to deport anybody who was in the UK illegally to Rwanda. The UK leaving the European Union was in large part due to anti-immigrant sentiment fuelled by xenophobia, again fuelled by politicians like Boris Johnson. These sentiments took root across social media platforms, and the rest as we are seeing is history.
If the countries of the world were serious, they would question why social media algorithms tend to always make it easy for hate speech to be found on almost any hand-held device and across most social media platforms. Media practitioners, just like politicians, also use immigrants to garner populism through clickbait stories. A study was done by Media Monitoring Africa that found that stories written about countries such as Zimbabwe are often written in a negative light to sell papers or to get more traffic to their news websites.
When Elon Musk bought the social media site formerly known as Twitter, he was warned that reactivating the accounts of people who had been banned on the site for spreading hate would have dire consequences for society at large. He obviously didn’t listen as his recent statements on the platform show that he has been radicalised by the far-right. This is further evidenced by his latest contribution on X about the #UKriots where he said that there is going to be a civil war in the UK which I believe further spurred the misinformation into disinformation. We have a far-right movement that is growing and finding new audiences easily with the lack of policies and laws that govern content and hate speech.
I think that it is time that social media companies and governments start taking responsibility for allowing the algorithms that run social media to fan the fires of hate. It is time that governments start taking the threat of hate speech seriously and have policies to combat the harms that come as a result of it. Social media companies need to be held to a much higher legal standard because they are failing to deal with hate speech and prolific racism online. However, it is also time that ordinary people, the users of social media, take a stand against hate and the harmful narratives that fuel xenophobic and racist riots.
*Ayanda Sishi-Wigzell is a social and political commentator, and a radio host.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media or IOL.