Tag: cybersecurity policy

Article 3: Influence Operations in South Africa – Identity, Grievance, and the Cognitive Battlespace

Given SHINGANGE

Article 1 of this series established influence operations as a defining feature of contemporary conflict, operating primarily in the cognitive domain rather than through force. Article 2 examined how digital platforms, algorithms, and fragmented media ecosystems enable these operations at scale. This third article addresses a more fundamental question: why such operations are increasingly effective in South Africa, even in the absence of clear attribution or coordinated campaigns.

Influence operations do not begin with messages or platforms; they begin with people. Specifically, they exploit how individuals understand identity, trust others, and interpret grievance. These elements constitute the cognitive battlespace. In South Africa, this battlespace has been shifting in measurable ways over the past decade, creating conditions that lower resistance to influence, polarisation, and narrative manipulation.

This article does not claim to identify or attribute specific influence operations targeting South Africa. Nor does it argue that changes in public attitudes are the direct result of coordinated campaigns. Instead, it examines the structural and psychological conditions that make influence more efficient once narratives are introduced. Influence operations rarely manufacture division; they succeed by activating and amplifying perceptions that already exist.

Identity Salience and Cognitive Fragmentation

Afrobarometer’s 2024/2025 survey data provides a credible empirical lens into South Africa’s cognitive terrain. The findings show a pronounced shift away from national identity towards ethnic identity. While most citizens still report balancing the two, one-quarter of South Africans now identify more strongly with their ethnic group than with being South African, and only a small minority prioritise national identity alone. This represents a sharp reversal from the early 2010s, when national identification peaked following the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

From an influence-operations perspective, this shift matters because national identity functions as a stabilising cognitive frame. When it weakens, audiences become more receptive to narratives that interpret politics, economics, and governance through group-based lenses. Identity does not need to be weaponised aggressively; its mere salience reduces the effort required to frame issues as exclusionary or zero-sum.

Afrobarometer data further shows that perceptions of ethnic discrimination by the state are widespread and cross-cutting. Nearly half of respondents believe their ethnic group is treated unfairly by government. In influence terms, the factual accuracy of this perception is secondary. What matters is that grievance frames already exist, are emotionally resonant, and can be activated without the introduction of false information.

Trust Erosion and the Weakening of Informal Resilience

Identity salience becomes operationally significant when combined with declining trust. Fewer than one-third of South Africans report trusting members of other ethnic groups. Low horizontal trust weakens informal social resilience mechanisms such as peer correction, cross-group dialogue, and social sanction against extreme narratives. It also increases reliance on in-group validation, which digital platforms are particularly effective at reinforcing.

At the same time, tolerance in everyday interactions remains relatively high. Most South Africans report that they would not mind living next to someone from a different ethnic group, and interethnic marriage remains broadly accepted. This apparent contradiction is critical. It suggests that the primary risk is not immediate social breakdown, but cognitive hardening: physical coexistence alongside psychological distancing. Contemporary influence operations are optimised for this condition, prioritising long-term attitudinal shifts over mobilisation or violence.

Synthesis: From Cognitive Conditions to Influence Effects

Taken together, the data points to a coherent influence-operations pathway. Rising identity salience provides the targeting variable; perceived grievance supplies emotional resonance; declining trust reduces social friction against polarising narratives; and digital platforms amplify emotionally charged content at scale. The result is not persuasion in the classical sense, but gradual normalisation of suspicion, disengagement, and interpretive closure. Influence succeeds not by convincing people of new ideas, but by narrowing how they interpret existing ones.

This synthesis is important because it clarifies that influence effectiveness in South Africa does not depend on sophisticated disinformation or foreign orchestration. It depends on the interaction between social fragmentation and an information ecosystem that rewards outrage, affirmation, and repetition.

Platforms, Amplification, and Narrative Stickiness

As discussed in Article 2, digital platforms privilege engagement over accuracy. In South Africa, media-monitoring and misinformation-reporting initiatives consistently show that polarising, identity-laden, and emotionally charged content outperforms corrective or contextual information. These dynamics do not require malicious intent. Political rhetoric, economic stress, historical grievance, and sensationalist media all feed into the same amplification loops.

This marks a departure from earlier models of information warfare. The threat is less about falsehood insertion and more about narrative dominance. Influence operations in this environment are often decentralised, opportunistic, and endogenous. Narratives are laundered across communities, reframed by local actors, and legitimised through repetition rather than authority.

Influence Without Attribution

A persistent weakness in South African discourse is the assumption that influence operations must be foreign, centralised, and provable. This assumption obscures more pervasive dynamics. As argued in Article 1, influence can be diffuse and politically ambiguous while still producing strategic effects. In South Africa, these effects may include declining confidence in democratic processes, normalisation of institutional distrust, and increased receptivity to simplistic explanations for complex governance challenges.

None of these outcomes require a single adversary. They require only a permissive cognitive environment and an information ecosystem optimised for emotional engagement.

Policy and Governance Implications

South Africa’s current security and governance frameworks are poorly aligned to these realities. Cybersecurity policy remains focused on technical infrastructure, cybercrime, and system integrity, with minimal engagement with cognitive or information-layer threats. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework, in particular, offers little guidance on influence, narrative resilience, or societal trust as security variables.

This creates a structural blind spot. Without recognising the cognitive battlespace, responses default to reactive communication, content takedowns, or politicised blame. None address the underlying conditions identified here. Building resilience requires institutional coordination across cybersecurity, communications, education, and social policy—areas that currently operate in silos.

Conclusion

Article 1 established influence operations as a defining feature of modern conflict. Article 2 explained how digital platforms enable them. This article has shown why South Africa is particularly exposed: not primarily because of hostile actors, but because of measurable shifts in identity, trust, and grievance that weaken cognitive resilience.

The most serious influence challenge facing South Africa may therefore be internal rather than external, structural rather than tactical. Until influence is understood as a function of societal conditions rather than isolated campaigns, policy responses will remain misaligned. Influence operations succeed not when societies are divided, but when they lack the institutional and social capacity to recognise how division is being exploited.

Conversations…..

What conversations are you involved in? What conversations are taking place, but you are not a part of? I am asking about conversations because they are the safest form of communication, or rather, they should be.

conversations

What conversations are you involved in? What conversations are taking place, but you are not a part of? I am asking about conversations because they are the safest form of communication, or rather, they should be.
A conversation is defined as “a talk, especially an informal one, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged”. This is a platform where everything that separates us does not matter – race, level of knowledge, position, etc. One would also assume that this form of communication requires those involved in it to have the ability to listen, have some form of emotional intelligence, and even be able to communicate their views clearly.
A lot of work goes behind having conversations that bring positive change, whether it be at a personal level, organizational level, or even at a national and international level.
Unfortunately, while many platforms are created in the guise of facilitating such conversation more often than not, they tend to take a different path. You also find that if someone engages in what is supposed to be a conversation with a paternalistic approach, the process loses its meaning. You often see a situation where one party is not free to engage because they think their input is subordinate to the inputs of the other party.
Be involved in conversations. If you are not involved in any, find one that you can be a part of.
There are different kinds of conversations. With some, we may not be granted the opportunity to participate in them, whereas it is up to us with others. Take, for instance, conversations that have to do with the country’s well-being: I believe we should all be involved in such conversations. While I have to acknowledge that it is not easy to have such, it is only through having them that we shall refine our ability.
In summary, conversations are a critical way of communicating, and we are obliged to have them. There are, however, prerequisites to having effective conversations. Some conversations are essential for us, such as conversations that have to do with national matters. We have to be involved and understand what it means to be involved, be clear as to what we have to bring to the table.
My current conversations………..

convo 2

I am involved in many conversations and would like to have many more conversations. I am mainly engaged in cyber security and business, knowledge, social issues, etc.
My time is consumed by the cyber security conversation. I am not complaining, or maybe I should rather say a security conversation.
Over the past five years, I have spent time researching the field, and I continue to do so because of its ever-changing nature. I have also been privileged enough to be involved in different government departments and the private sector dealing with cyber security. It continues to be an exciting field. At the same time, when you look at how some countries like South Africa are dealing with it, you can’t help but worry.
As a side note, I just want to say that sometimes the people having the “conversation” are wrong. For various reasons, of course…
…But going back to the topic, I think we need to restart the conversation about cyber security, and we must not be shy to do so. There is absolutely nothing wrong with continuing, especially when the context requires a rethink.
Perhaps we should start by looking at the National Development Plan as a guiding document for what the country wants to achieve. I think we have not fully internalized the plan, and we are found wanting all the time. So, any conversation with a national bearing must first start with an understanding and an appropriate interpretation of the NDP.
I think we have missed an opportunity to do this, but all is not lost. Every conversation must be guided by some rules written and unwritten (e.g. relationship rules). Just like the constitution, whatever we plan to do, must not in any way be unconstitutional.
What we have experienced as a country is that we have written policies that we cannot implement. A lazy conclusion in many cases is that we have an implementation problem. We assume that the policies are not the problem; we are the problem because we fail to implement them. Once a policy has been signed, we stick to it, without ever considering that maybe the signed policy is not “implementable” or perhaps the policy itself is no longer relevant because the context has changed.
South Africa has the National Cybersecurity Policy Framework signed by Cabinet in 2012. This happens to be the only guide that deals with cybersecurity directly. Since its introduction, one would assume that much progress would have been made, and we would be much safer. However, we still have a cybercrime and cybersecurity bill in parliament, and I doubt it will be signed soon.
In this case, the conversation we should have answered the “so what now?” question. What does this reality mean for us as a country that is of late not doing very well economically? I know for a fact that there is a conversation taking place, or rather that has been taking place, but the same questions above should be raised. Are those involved in the conversation the right people? I think not. So, while we may not be directly involved in some of the conversations that have an impact on our lives, especially where such conversations are taking place on our behalf, we have to make sure that we know those who are representing us and be sure that they have what it takes to represent us as well.
Although this is a critical topic, it is not the only topic that we all should be having conversations about. Even in matters that we think we already have under control, we must always create platforms where we can evaluate if we are on the right track through conversations.
Let’s sit down and have a conversation. Are you prepared?

Bra G