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X marks the spot where the fundamentals of democracy were put to the torch

Nicole Fritz
By Nicole Fritz
3 Oct 2023
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Will Elon Musk give a fig that he helps further fray South African democracy? Probably not. On his acquisition of Twitter, Musk notoriously slashed resources and staff directed at content moderation and collapsed its Trust and Safety Council. Twitter’s only Africa office was shuttered.

Anyone looking to Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk for an account of how growing up in 1980s apartheid South Africa shaped Musk, will do so much as one might search for content moderation of X/Twitter – in vain. 

As omissions go they’re hardly equivalent. The absence of content moderation on X/Twitter has grave implications for democracy worldwide. For South Africa, set to go to the polls next year, that absence is particularly ominous. 

Still Isaacson’s omission veils critical reference points. It’s worth reflecting, for instance, that when Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, Helen Suzman was nearing the end of a long, lonely 13-year stint as the sole voice of opposition in apartheid South Africa’s Parliament. It is almost impossible that he would have grown up not knowing of her example. 

During this period she was subjected to frightening levels of abuse and bullying by her fellow MPs and yet was afforded her right to speak and protection by the House Speaker. 

Indeed, when she was accused of being responsible for the assassination of apartheid’s chief architect, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, PW Botha – who was later to assume the South African presidency during apartheid’s states of emergency years – was required to retract and apologise for those statements. 

Musk says he is a free speech absolutist. That may be the reflective, countercultural viewpoint of a man whose early ideas of censorship were formed against a backdrop of 1980s Pretoria.

In those years, had Suzman simply been the hostage of the heckler’s veto, if she’d only been yelled at, subjected to an unrelenting barrage of ludicrous conspiracy and accusation, the target of near-constant threats to her physical security so that she was intimidated from speaking, none of her impressive contribution would have been possible.

She was able to uncover abuse and bring to light apartheid’s injustices because even apartheid South Africa offered her a mediated forum within which to make her contributions. In short, had the apartheid Parliament been conducted with as little moderation and regulation as Musk’s X/Twitter, there would have been no possibility of Helen Suzman. 

Musk says he is a free speech absolutist. That may be the reflective, countercultural viewpoint of a man whose early ideas of censorship were formed against a backdrop of 1980s Pretoria.

But it is to fail to grasp, as Princeton academic Dr Zeynep Tufekci has written, “that the most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fuelled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.” 

And so it is proving in South Africa right now. As the election nears, ruling-party politicians and others happy for whatever paths might propel them to power, offer up scapegoats to explain away dismal governance failures. It’s migrants’ fault. It’s NGOs. It’s the courts. It’s still apartheid’s fault. 

That would be bad enough. But that the chorus is taken up on X/Twitter especially, in deliberately organised campaigns and by the deliberately misled so that any who challenge these narratives are inundated with intimidation and disinformation, means a shrinking space for speech. 

I know of which I speak. In recent months, as a result of our challenge to the South African government’s decision to terminate and effectively forcibly expel about 180,000 Zimbabweans who have lived in South Africa perfectly lawfully for the past 14 years, many of whom would otherwise have qualified as refugees, we have faced X/Twitter campaigns of lurid accusation and threat.

Our key message – that decisions of this magnitude must be sourced in sound reason and offer fair process to those adversely affected – seems the very antithesis of the X-storm we’ve faced. 

In 2022, before Musk’s purchase, we had a hope when submitting complaints that some of the most offensive threats and absurd disinformation might be taken down, the originating accounts temporarily suspended. Now complaints to Musk’s X/Twitter elicit no real response.

Real411, a South African initiative to fight online harm and which has partnered with the Electoral Commission of South Africa in the run-up to the 2024 elections, appears to be having no better luck. Despite making authoritative determinations of fake and harmful content, its recommendations to X/Twitter of takedown seem to be simply ignored. 

And these experiences are by no means unique. Across the country, civil society, journalists and independent commentators face similar onslaught. Will Musk give a fig that he helps further fray South African democracy? Probably not.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Revenge of the nerd – who is Elon Musk?

On his acquisition of Twitter, Musk notoriously slashed resources and staff directed at content moderation and collapsed its Trust and Safety Council. Twitter’s only Africa office was shuttered. 

Even in the markets that matter most to him, he appears supremely indifferent: in May he pulled out of the EU’s code to fight disinformation and is currently suing the state of California for its law requiring social media platforms to regularly post their content moderation policies and report on how they address hate speech, racism and other disinformation.

In recent days, it has come to light that Musk is cutting X/Twitter’s election integrity team by half after promising to expand it.  

At this rate, the annals of history may record contemporary South Africa less for the health and sustainability of its democracy than for being the birthplace of a man who put a torch to much of what is fundamental to democracy. DM

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