ELECTIONS ONLINE OP-ED: A White Cross surge, GNU partners trade blows — the week in SA’s online politics

Between Friday, 25 September, and Thursday, 1 October 2026, Murmur Intelligence tracked political conversation across X, popular public Facebook pages, TikTok and beyond. On X alone, about 680,000 posts were authored by, or posted about, South African parties, institutions and politicians. On TikTok, 75 evaluated political videos drew 2.5 million views.The White Cross Project and anti-foreigners vie for first placeThree communities stood out on X. The largest was a cluster of Afrikaner rights and rural security activists around Ernst Roets’s Lex Libertas organisation, and AfriForum and its leader, Kallie Kriel. It made up 13% of accounts, but generated almost a quarter (24%) of all posts. It temporarily displaced the anti-immigrant community, the loudest on X in previous snapshots. Roets also ran one of the two most-engaged political pages on Facebook.Ernst Roets speaks at a tribute to Charlie Kirk outside the US embassy on 11 September 2025 in Pretoria. (File photo: Deaan Vivier / Gallo Images)The surge looks event-driven, though, so it remains to be seen whether conversations can be sustained at these levels going into the elections, and which party would benefit from them. The community promoted the #WhiteCrossProject display in Washington during UN General Assembly week; its share of posts peaked on the day of the event, Saturday, 26 September, as the display drew attention, then fell as talk of the crosses faded. The network shape below also shows a community talking mostly to itself: 80% of its interactions stayed internal, against 60-65% for other large communities. This community’s mean “buzzer score”, a measure of repeated, coordinated boosting, was among the lowest in the network despite its volume. Thus, its high post volumes with little coordinated boosting point to passionate activism rather than manufactured reach.Indeed, US-based accounts made up a notable secondary part of the Afrikaner rights conversation, representing about a quarter of users in that community. While high, this suggests that the community did not appear to tap into American amplification machinery that past “white genocide” conversations benefited from.In 2025, those conversations were overwhelmingly dominated by US users. This highlighted the divide clearly: “white genocide” is a conversation tailored for conservatives in the Global North, while the South African conversation focuses on rural safety.The anti-immigrant community, centred on Jacinta Ngobese of March and March, presented the opposite profile. It produced 15% of posts from 8% of accounts, and its average buzzer score was three times that of the Afrikaner activist community.One cohort of about 1,460 accounts repeatedly amplified the same posts throughout the week. Murmur Intelligence has seen this pattern of sustained artificial amplification since the community emerged in 2020.The EFF and the MK partyThe EFF supporters’ community came third on X, with 14% of posts from 7% of accounts. That is in line with the party’s share in earlier snapshots, but now behind both the Afrikaner activist and anti-immigrant communities, where once this community dominated X/Twitter. A cohort of about 1,330 accounts drove #VoteEFF2026 and #VictoryOrDeath ahead of the party’s Eastern Cape manifesto rallies.RET and MK party supporters have been relatively quiet since their figurehead, Duduzile Sambudla-Zuma, went to ground after being accused of helping to recruit South Africans to fight for Russia in Ukraine.After disappearing as a distinct community in our recent snapshots, they produced 7% of posts from 4% of accounts this week. Their energy went into celebrating Busisiwe Mkhwebane's acquittal, Jacob Zuma’s local election drive and Tony Yengeni’s call to vote the GNU out.Inside the GNU: governing together, campaigning apartThe ANC and GNU community (6% of accounts, 8% of posts) was less a forum for the government and more a criticism of it. More than half its posts were directed at GNU members rather than amplifying content from such members, and a quarter named President Cyril Ramaphosa, mostly to criticise him.The ANC’s #VoteANC2026 campaign trail, also visible in door-to-door posts on Facebook, ran alongside appeals to reinstate police commissioner Fannie Masemola, renewed PPE-corruption anger and attacks on Operation Vulindlela. Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula spent much of the week fighting AfriForum. On TikTok, a clip of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma alleging Mbalula handed out cash at the ANC’s 2022 conference also spread widely.ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo) The GNU’s most-shared good-news story came from Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber’s demonstration of a working digital ID prototype. Yet the DA barely featured in the community’s conversation.The coalition’s real contest played out on the campaign trail. On TikTok, DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis cast his party as the only one able to stop an EFF “takeover” of the metros.He also accused the ANC of lying about which party’s Knysna mayor had been arrested. Helen Zille’s Johannesburg mayoral campaign contrasted “billions spent” by the DA with “billions looted” by the ANC. On Facebook, DA MP Ian Cameron ran one of the two most-engaged political pages, and Cilliers Brink attacked Tshwane’s electricity tenders.DA Federal leader Geordin Hill-Lewis. (Photo: Gallo Images / OJ Koloti) At the Patriotic Alliance’s Bloemfontein manifesto launch, PA leader and Sport Minister Gayton McKenzie promised the DA would hold no power in Mangaung or Cape Town, and PA rallies were among the leading party content on Facebook. Outside the coalition, ActionSA pushed its manifesto on Facebook.Paid influencers: undisclosed promotion of the state?Over the same week, a pool of about 30 suspected paid influencers promoted five public entities: Gauteng’s housing department, the Services Seta (the Services Sector Education and Training Authority), Prasa, a township economy programme and the Ngwathe municipality.Their 700-plus posts came in tight bursts of near-identical copy, none disclosed as advertising, though the same accounts labelled posts that they made for Samsung and FNB with #ad. Every campaign cast ANC-led entities favourably ahead of the vote, though some of the same accounts attacked the ANC and immigrants in their own voices.Wrapping it all upThe week’s loudest political voices were not the parties, but movements promoting issues that create issue platforms that are then parlayed into votes: Afrikaner activists briefly speaking past the rest of the country to Washington, and anti-immigrant campaigners whose reach is persistently inflated. The first is likely to recede as the White Cross Project moment passes; the second has proved incredibly durable.The parties are campaigning hard, but the GNU’s partners are spending that energy on one another, while state entities appear to be buying favourable coverage without saying so. DMKyle Findlay is the co-founder of Murmur Intelligence and LLMEKNOW. Aldu Cornelissen, the technical mind and co-founder of Murmur Intelligence, a Cape Town-based consultancy, is a pioneer in AI-driven pipelines and analytics of complex unstructured data.