The Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has decided to welcome American state security into our electoral system.

It should be said that we have experienced a fair bit of fake content on social media recently, notably the AI-generated fake voice note claiming to be from DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach, in which it was claimed that John Steenhuisen was selling the Western Cape as collateral in exchange for party funds.

Additionally, we have had the Zuma- and Gupta-connected racial smear campaign from 2016 by Bell Pottinger, which introduced the "white monopoly capital" concept into daily discourse in anti-white circles.

But the organisation selected to be the official partner for the IEC is a notoriously left-biased and incompetent organisation called Real411.

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The circus is in town

While the policy was announced in July, Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), the organisations tasked with carrying out online censorship in collaboration with Google, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok, has released a new statement on TechCentral to boast of their new and authoritative role leading up to the 2024 elections.

MMA and its partner Real411, both run by drama school graduate and NGO lifer William Bird, are an official platform for reporting “misinformation”, and will be empowered to censor South Africans on social media sites run by its partners.

The complaints will be shared with the IEC’s Directorate for Electoral Offences, which is notoriously lax, and will most likely just perform a redundant record-keeping function.

The Real411 platform is essentially an official platform for complaining about and ratting out people they disagree with online, reporting them to moderators on various platforms.

But they are not serious people so much as a comic danger.

On the one hand, the organisation even proudly helped send people to prison for disagreeing with the lockdown policies in 2020.

On the other, they also famously fact-check jokes, such as The Kiffness’s joke about a government app asking for his credit card details.

They are also easy liars, reporting Johnathan Witt for disinformation in the same year, for pointing out information that is freely available on their website, namely that they are funded by and in partnership with George Soros’s OSF.

Additionally, they “fact-checked” comments about South Africa’s power grid collapsing, and firing white engineers, despite both of these facts not only being true, but causally connected.

Bird’s two little perches are paid for by the same cluster of trans-Atlantic NGOs which bankroll pro-land invasion groups like Ndifuna Ukwazi, SERI and Reclaim the City - the Open Society Foundation, the Raith Foundation.

They mainly attract people who complain about opponents to open borders, dissenters from the official line on COVID policy, and those who talk about farm murders or the government’s racial discrimination policies.

While they also highlight the violence during the July 2021 riots in KwaZulu-Natal as an example of the sort of thing they could attempt to contain, they aren’t doing this out of an attempt to contain violence against minorities.

The riots in question were an operation by the MKVA to pressure the government to free Zuma from his incarceration for contempt of court in a corruption hearing, and bid people loot and attack businesses, and eventually homes, belonging to Indians and whites as a means of motivating the crowds.

But the issues the censors have with these is not so much the factual content as the narratives they support - it is about who are designated as enemies or friends.

Zuma and his pals may be nasty characters, but they weren’t targeted for lying. Cyril Ramaphosa is never corrected by these people for his inveterate mendacity. Instead, this is a system to defend favoured factions in the South African elite power game, and the left-leaning staff are selected for ideological loyalty.

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Censorship industry

Mike Benz of the Foundation for Information Freedom Online has written extensively about links between American state security and online censorship, as part of what he calls the censorship industry, which has flourished in recent years, as a means to contain opposition to the Anglo-American establishment.

His two-part crash-course in the day-to-day functioning of this now multi-billion dollar state-funded industry can be found here and here.

According to Benz, the DHS collaborated with tech companies to censor 'foreign, inauthentic, coordinated' social media activity, such as 'Russian interference,' before switching to censoring 'domestic, authentic, organic' social media activity in summer 2020. DHS employs a 'whole of society' approach to censorship, pressuring all institutions in society to censor specific topics.

The DHS has effectively established a "Ministry of Truth", and CISA (Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency), primarily staffed by former CIA, NSA, FBI, military, and private sector professionals, is a key player in the censorship efforts too.

They operate through a network involving government partners, private sector companies, civil society groups, and media. These receive extensive direct and indirect funding from the state and NGOs which have decades-old partnerships with the state, like the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Open Society Foundations.

.The Disinformation Governance Board, introduced in April 2022, was a coordinating body for the ongoing Ministry of Truth rather than its termination.

DHS designates US citizens' social media opinions about Covid-19 and other matters as a 'cyber attack on critical infrastructure,' claiming 'disinformation' is a 'digital threat' that 'undermines confidence' in public health.

This allows DHS to censor citizen grievances against US government policies by treating disagreement as a digital threat.

DHS's censorship practices involve distinguishing between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, with an emphasis on categorizing most targets as 'disinformation.'

Misinformation means falsehoods, disinformation means deliberate lies, and malinformation means things which are true but harmful.

Since 2014, it has been public knowledge that the American government, starting under the Obama administration, has worked through the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA to establish an informal organisation called the Enduring Security Framework, to manipulate online discourse at home and abroad.

Leaked email exchanges between NSA Director General Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt reveal a close working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government.

The emails, dating from June 2012, showed Alexander inviting Schmidt to a "classified threat briefing" on mobility threats and security, emphasizing the need for Silicon Valley's help.

The correspondence indicated cooperation under the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), involving industry leaders like Intel, AMD, HP, Dell, and Microsoft, focusing on securing enterprise BIOS to address threats. The German magazine Der Spiegel later reported that the NSA inserted back doors into BIOS, similar to what the agency accused others of doing.

Under COVID, the landscape expanded into the Poynter Institute and the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which control and select which news sources can and can’t be regarded as reliable, coordinating acceptable perspectives and editorial polices across all of the Western world’s media landscape under a single umbrella.

With cooperation from Google and Meta, those who do not toe the line established by the Poynter Institute, or are not members of the TNI, are aggressively deboosted in search results and SM news feeds.

This has created the most extensively controlled media landscape in the West since the Second World War.

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2024

Going forward, key players in this American-funded and -supported network will be helping steer the public conversation on our upcoming election, with a rubber stamp from the national government.

It is hard to tell at this stage how much of this is naivité, how much is lack of ideological self-awareness, and how much is conscious collusion or pressure.

But what is certain, is that we have empowered a whole cluster of unqualified and malicious individuals to harass and persecute people they don’t like online.

While they do in fact challenge people whose grip on hard facts may be somewhat loose, their priorities and biases favour powerful institutional factors who may not have our best interests at heart.

And for a new movement like Cape independence, which already draws the ire of the majority and the establishment, we may be facing an uphill battle.

It is fortunate that for now, X is still run by free-speech maximalist Elon Musk.

But with the winds against our bow, best we speak with care.