Monitoring and Analysis of Hateful Language in South Africa Report #6.
As we bring our monitoring of hateful language in South Africa to a close, we’re looking back on the trends we’ve seen since we started our analysis almost two months ago. Since just before the election:
We’ve witnessed an increase of 170% in the volume of hateful posts.
Within the past two weeks alone, we’ve tracked 11,433 hateful language posts, an increase of 34% over the last reporting period.
Conversation online has been dominated by terms like “Land Thieves” and “White Monopoly Capital” while ongoing debates on land access, inequality, and race continued to be hot-button topics for many of South Africa’s social media users.
PeaceTech Lab, in partnership with Media Monitoring Africa, monitored and analyzed online and offline hateful language trends throughout South Africa’s election season to offer insights on the potential relationship between this type of language and instances of violence seen in municipalities country-wide. The final report in our six-part series, this data aims to support South Africans, NGOs, local governments, and social media companies as they work to build an effective response to hateful language in the context of the country’s election.
