The fake news army marches on
Analysis shows how campaign diverted state capture buzz
AT THE end of last month an increasingly desperate Gupta family sold its media assets to former government bureaucrat and Tiger Brands executive Mzwanele “Jimmy” Manyi.
The R450-million valuation of The New Age newspaper and ANN7 television station has come in for sharp corporate scrutiny but the sale reveals why Manyi is a significant influencer in the fake news campaign.
His is one of 19 authentic accounts that took the message from the black-ops world of an automated Twitter army into the networks of power in the real world.
The Black First Land First movement and its founder Andile Mngxitama are also commanders of the fake news army. Mngxitama was funded by the Guptas and is a regular commentator on ANN7.
Bell Pottinger’s role in creating the fake Twitter and Facebook army will emerge only once the company reveals the results of an internal investigation.
But the UK PR company was central to the attempt to shift the debate away from state capture by President Jacob Zuma and his collaborators towards the purported dominance of the economy by white-owned or controlled businesses.
A range of hashtags was coined to coincide with a political campaign to change the leadership of the Treasury and the SA Reserve Bank, to put pressure on banks to re-open the Guptas’ accounts and ensure that former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report reached a dead end.
The #PravinMustGo hashtag was retweeted 24 463 times and Gordhan had another 8 936 tweets authored about him. (A separate analysis puts the number much higher at 183 620 tweets from 32 180 users.)
The campaign to discount state capture and Madonsela’s report used another 18 000 tweets.
Former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas, who turned down a R600million bribe to be Gordhan’s successor, faced a barrage of 3 500 negative tweets.
At least 15 journalists who wrote about state capture were lampooned in graphics as lapdogs of white monopoly capital under the hashtag #mediacapture via 3 418 tweets.
Like the Infogate campaign of the ’70s, this new version had political purposes.
Topics related to the Treasury and the Reserve Bankwere tweeted 41 515 times and the campaign against white monopoly capital got 10 810 tweets.
This analysis shows the network’s primary goal was to capture the Treasury and the Reserve Bank.
Aside from this objective, significant energy was focused on setting up “white monopoly capital” as the enemy, rather than state capture, and on attacking critics of the Gupta empire and Zuma.