Antisocial media’s fear and loathing
SOUTH Africans are getting more xenophobic — at least if social media is anything to go by.
And four out of every 100 social media posts about xenophobia encourage violence against foreigners, according to a study by the Citizen Research Centre released last week.
It was “most disturbing”, said researchers, that some of the posts were a direct call to violence.
The study also found that comments by prominent politicians and leaders — including those by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini in 2015 and by Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba this year — often resulted in increased anti-foreigner sentiment online.
Zwelithini’s and Mashaba’s comments were followed by violent attacks on foreigners.
Last year there were 234 000 social media posts on xenophobia at an average of 640 per day. In the first two months of 2017, there were 115 000 posts, at an average of 1 958 per day.
As many as 21 660 posts in 2015 could be classified as “extreme hate speech or incitement to violence” against foreigners, compared to 9 363 in 2016, the research found.
Proportionally, these represented 4% of all social media conversations around xenophobia. Already this year, 1 156 social media posts fitting this description have been sent.
Other findings show that “hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric” is also common — 4 623 social media statements of this nature were posted in January and February this year, compared to 16 387 in 2016 and 25 720 in 2015. But these were less than the 34 541 posts made in 2014, just before mass xenophobic violence broke out in March 2015.
Researchers cautioned that the sheer volume of negative sentiment emphasises that antiimmigrant rhetoric needs to be monitored and addressed continually, as it can often be a precursor to violence.
Stuart Jones, director of Vibrand Research and the Citizen Research Centre, said the data represented the unsolicited views of ordinary citizens.
“In this study . . . we didn’t go and ask as many people as possible what their views on xenophobia are.
“Rather, we looked at what tens of thousands of people had to say on social media about xenophobia.
“In this sense, data from social media represents the truest expression of people’s views on any given subject,” said Jones.
The research centre does “social research” — either through face-to-face interviews or social media analysis — in 54 countries in Africa and the Middle East. It aims to provide accurate data that can be used to make policy decisions.
The research found that the conversation on xenophobia was the highest in 2015 due to comments attributed to King Zwelithini, believed to have subsequently led to xenophobic violence in KwaZulu-Natal, which then spread throughout South Africa.
Using an analytics platform called Crimson Hexagon, researchers isolated and analysed all public social media pertaining to xenophobia in the country — across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram — and looked at forums, chatrooms, comments and blog posts.
The study found there was a more recent tendency to associate foreigners with criminal activity — something that was aggravated by Mashaba’s comments that “illegal” immigrants were criminals.
The government needed to admit that there was a problem, because simply saying that South Africans were not xenophobic did not change “the fact that a great many South Africans are”, Jones said.
“The first step towards dealing with the problem is acknowledging that it exists — various politicians, including President [Jacob] Zuma have denied that there is a xenophobia problem.”
The xenophobic outbreaks in 2015 and this year were preceded by “irresponsible statements by public figures”.
We looked at what people said about xenophobia . . . data from social media is the truest expression of people’s views