Facebook’s plans to fight election misinformation in South Africa

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is working directly with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to ensure its platforms are not used as misinformation tools during the 2024 South African elections.

Speaking with the Business Times, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said it has given the IEC extensive guidance on using social media platforms effectively.

“We’ve done a significant amount of training with the Electoral Commission, including how they should use their WhatsApp bot to communicate with South Africans and give reliable information about the elections,” said Clegg.

“Also with the parties and with committees in parliament — we’ve done a number of briefings on our election preparedness, and explained to them how our tools work.”

Clegg acknowledged that 2024 will be a challenging year. Not only will it be the year with the most national elections in history; there are also new technologies like generative AI that it must contend with.

“I spend probably the bulk of my time at the moment on exactly that (generative AI): how do we make sure that we have the right guardrails in place, given this technology is so new,” said Clegg.

Co-operation is key

Clegg also noted that Meta has entered into a voluntary agreement with other ICT giants to deal with misinformation.

The agreement was signed at the 60th annual Munich Security Conference in February and included companies like Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok, and X.

“You can’t control or regulate something you can’t identify in the first place. Identifying the origin, the provenance, and being able to detect the genesis of synthetic content is really quite important,” said Clegg.

Clegg said that the elections that have happened so far in other countries seemed to have minimal manipulation through the hidden use of AI. However, he cautioned against complacency, as “it can change from one minute to the next.”

“But so far, in those elections which have taken place, there has been the use of these AI tools but not nearly on the kind of society-wide election-disrupting scale that we might have feared.”

South African elections

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced last month that South Africa’s elections will occur on 29 May 2024.

Almost 370 political parties are eligible to participate in the election, and these elections will also be the first in which independent candidates can compete for national and provincial office.

The election period has not been without controversy, as the IEC has already reported two data leaks. These leaks exposed the parliamentary candidate lists of the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) parties.

It fired a staff member shortly after the leaks were reported. The Information Regulator has also launched an investigation.

“The regulator will attend to the notifications from the IEC in accordance with the requirements of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA),” said the Information Regulator.

“The Regulator has advised the IEC that the notifications […] do not provide sufficient details about the incidents to make them compliant with POPIA requirements.”

President Cyril Ramaphosa told the media that the leaks, while unfortunate, were not reflective of the IEC’s systems.

“Somehow, somebody at the IEC leaked the list, before they could examine it and before they could invoke their own processes to have the lists publicly available,” Ramaphosa was quoted as saying.

“We have been in discussion with [the IEC]. They have informed us that it was just a glitch. It is not representative of the IEC system.”

Online system implemented for overseas voters

For the first time, South Africans living or travelling abroad can register to vote online for the country’s national elections.

The new online voter registration system was rolled out in early December 2023, and as of February, it had already surpassed 30,000 registrations.

In contrast, the total number of South Africans who voted from outside the country in the 2019 national elections was 19,009.

At least 915,000 South Africans live in other countries — and the new system gives them the opportunity to easily vote from abroad.