Given SHINGANGE
South Africa is moving toward the 2026 local government elections with an outdated understanding of how political power is contested. We still speak as if elections are mainly decided by party structures, policy promises, door-to-door campaigning, rallies, and media debates. Those tools still matter, but they no longer explain outcomes on their own, and in some cases, they are no longer decisive.
A modern election is also a contest over perception, emotion, identity, and trust. It is a contest over what people believe is happening, what they feel is at stake, who they blame, who they fear, and what they think is “obviously true”. This is the cognitive domain, where influence operations thrive.
If we continue to treat electoral manipulation as a problem of “fake news” alone, we will remain exposed. We will also respond in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and with the wrong tools. The result will not necessarily be a dramatic collapse. It will be gradual erosion, a slow weakening of public trust, social cohesion, and democratic legitimacy, often without a single headline moment that forces the country to wake up.
This article is the conceptual foundation for a series on influence operations and democratic resilience ahead of the 2026 local government elections. Before we can talk about policy responses, party readiness, or public resilience, we must first get the concepts right. If the concepts are wrong, everything built on them will be weak.
The problem with the “fake news” frame
South Africa’s public conversation about manipulation and elections is too often trapped in a narrow frame: fake news, misinformation, disinformation. This language is convenient because it suggests a simple problem with a simple fix: remove the lies, flag the posts, fact-check the claims, suspend the accounts. It also allows institutions to present the challenge as a content-moderation issue rather than a broader strategic threat.
But the fake news frame is incomplete and, in some cases, misleading.
The most effective influence operations do not depend on fabricated stories. Many rely on selective truth, edited context, emotional framing, strategic timing, repetition, and amplification through familiar voices. A true incident can be framed to provoke panic, rage, humiliation, or hatred. A genuine grievance can be escalated into a moral war. A real policy failure can be used to delegitimise the entire idea of governance, not simply a particular party or municipal leadership.
In other words, influence is often about impact, not accuracy.
This matters because if we keep looking only for lies, we will miss the more sophisticated operations that use truth as raw material. If we keep believing that fact-checking is the primary defence, we will discover too late that facts do not easily defeat identity threats, emotional narratives, or group belonging.
We must upgrade the frame.
What influence operations actually are
Influence operations are deliberate efforts to shape perception, attitudes, and behavior at scale. They are designed to steer how audiences interpret reality, what they feel about it, and what they choose to do next. They work best when the target audience does not realise they are being influenced, or when influence feels natural, inevitable, and self-generated.
Influence operations are not only external threats. They are not only foreign. They are not only malicious. They are methods, and methods are used by different actors for different reasons. States, political campaigns, activist networks, commercial actors, and opportunistic groups use them. This does not mean all actors are equivalent, or that intent does not matter. It means that if we want to understand the environment honestly, we must accept that influencing behaviour is part of modern political competition and social contestation.
A crucial point must be stated clearly: influence operations do not create divisions from nothing. They identify pre-existing fractures and apply pressure. They exploit what is already emotionally charged, socially sensitive, or institutionally fragile.
In a society with deep inequality, high unemployment, persistent service delivery failures, historical trauma, and declining trust in institutions, the terrain is already prepared. This is not a moral judgment about citizens. It is a strategic assessment of the operating environment.
Persuasion, propaganda, and influence are not the same thing.
To build conceptual clarity, it helps to distinguish between persuasion, propaganda, and influence operations. These terms are often used interchangeably in South African commentary, which creates confusion and poor decision-making.
Persuasion is open. It is explicit. It is the normal activity of democratic politics. A party or candidate presents ideas and asks voters to agree, support, or participate. The audience understands that it is being persuaded. There is no requirement for concealment. Persuasion can be honest or dishonest, but its defining feature is that it is visible and transactional.
Propaganda is more ideological and directive. It tends to push a worldview, demand loyalty, suppress alternatives, and simplify reality into rigid binaries. Propaganda often seeks dominance rather than debate. It is not always covert, but it typically aims to shape what is acceptable to think and say, and to marginalise competing frames.
Influence operations are different. They are adaptive, indirect, and often covert or deniable. They do not primarily tell people what to think. They guide people toward conclusions they feel they reached independently. They work by shaping the environment in which people think, through emotional cues, social proof, selective exposure, and identity framing.
This distinction matters because the defences differ. If you think the problem is persuasion, you focus on counter-messaging and debate. If you think the problem is propaganda, you focus on media plurality and civic education. If you understand the problem as influence operations, you must address the cognitive and social conditions that make manipulation effective, not only the content itself.
The cognitive domain is the decisive terrain.
Conflict has evolved. In earlier eras, the decisive battlefield was physical. Later, it expanded into the digital domain, networks, systems, and infrastructure. Today, one of the most decisive terrains is cognitive, the domain of perception, emotion, identity, and trust.
The cognitive domain includes beliefs, emotional triggers, moral frameworks, social identity, and sensemaking. It is where people decide what is real, what matters, who is legitimate, and what action feels necessary.
This is where influence operations aim, because if you can shape perception and trust, you do not always need to change material conditions. If you can make institutions appear incompetent, illegitimate, or hostile, you can weaken governance without direct confrontation. If you can make communities distrust each other, you can destabilise social cohesion. If you can make citizens believe that outcomes are rigged, regardless of the evidence, you can undermine elections without hacking a single system.
It is important to be disciplined here. Saying elections are cognitive contests does not mean every political message is manipulation, or that citizens are mind-controlled, or that there is always a hidden hand. It means that perception and emotion are strategic variables, and that modern actors treat them accordingly. If institutions and the public refuse to recognise this, they fight with blunt tools against refined methods.
Influence operations are not always about changing votes.
Many people assume influence operations exist to persuade voters to support a particular party or candidate. That can happen, but it is not always the primary objective, and focusing only on vote shifting can blind us to other goals.
Influence operations often aim to disrupt rather than persuade. They may seek to increase confusion, deepen polarisation, exhaust attention, erode trust in institutions, fracture communities, or delegitimise election outcomes. In some cases, the goal is to reduce participation, increase apathy, and drive voters out of democratic engagement.
This is one reason why simplistic responses fail. If the operation is designed to make people believe “nothing is trustworthy” or “everyone is corrupt” or “the system is rigged”, then fact-checking individual claims does not address the core effect. It can even worsen the situation by making institutions look defensive or selective.
A society that loses trust is easier to manipulate, because cynicism becomes the default. When citizens are cynical, they accept claims that confirm their despair, and they reject information that demands patience, nuance, or institutional confidence.
Why elections create ideal conditions for influence
Elections combine several conditions that make societies cognitively vulnerable.
First, elections heighten emotion. People care about identity, belonging, and the future. Campaigns are built to trigger emotion because emotion drives attention and participation. That is not a flaw; it is politics. But it also creates an environment where manipulation can blend into normal campaigning and activism.
Second, elections compress time. People must make decisions quickly. Institutions must respond under pressure. Media cycles accelerate. There is less time for reflection, verification, and calm sensemaking. This is ideal for narratives that demand immediate reaction.
Third, elections create information overload. People are bombarded with claims, promises, scandals, and counterclaims. When information volume increases, attention becomes scarce. Under those conditions, people rely more on cognitive shortcuts, emotional cues, and group identity.
Fourth, elections intensify social comparison and status anxiety. People measure themselves against others, measure communities against other communities, and measure the country against imagined alternatives. This can trigger resentment, humiliation, and moral outrage, all of which are powerful drivers of mobilisation.
These conditions do not guarantee successful influence operations, but they increase the likelihood of success when influence actors exploit them.
Why local government elections are uniquely exposed
Local government elections are particularly vulnerable for reasons that are specific to South Africa’s lived reality.
Local governance is where citizens experience the state most directly. It is the level at which service delivery failures are felt in water, electricity, housing, sanitation, roads, refuse removal, safety, and local economic opportunity. When people feel neglected or disrespected, their anger is not abstract. It is personal.
Local politics is also closer to community identity. It is tied to neighbourhoods, wards, local leaders, and local disputes. This makes narratives more emotionally intense and more difficult to correct, because local information spreads through informal networks, community WhatsApp groups, and everyday social relationships where trust is relational rather than institutional.
Local elections also tend to have less comprehensive scrutiny than national elections. The information environment is more fragmented. Local media may be weaker. National attention is inconsistent. This creates gaps that can be exploited by actors seeking to seed and amplify narratives quickly.
Finally, local elections intersect with community-level mobilisation and protest dynamics. If trust collapses locally, the consequences can be immediate: protests, rejection of councillors, intimidation, violence, and paralysis of local governance. Influence operations do not need to produce a national crisis to be strategically effective. Local instability can be enough.
The uncomfortable truth about who conducts influence operations
Many South Africans are comfortable discussing “foreign interference” because it allows the country to imagine the threat as external and exceptional. Foreign actors can play a role, and it is reasonable to take that possibility seriously. But focusing only on foreign interference can become a form of denial.
Influence operations are also domestic. Political actors use influence techniques. Activist networks use influence techniques. Commercial interests use influence techniques. Opportunistic groups use influence techniques. Sometimes these actors coordinate. Often, they do not need to. Narratives can converge without central control, because different groups see benefit in amplifying the same emotional frames.
This is why influence operations are difficult to attribute and difficult to regulate. The behaviour often appears to be normal political engagement until its effects become destabilising. At that point, the response becomes politically sensitive because any intervention can be framed as suppression, bias, or censorship.
If South Africa wants resilience, it must accept that influence is not a rare anomaly. It is part of the modern environment. The question is how to preserve democratic participation and free expression while reducing vulnerability to manipulation and destabilisation.
Why “more information” is not a solution
A common assumption is that the solution to manipulation is better information. The logic goes like this: if citizens have more accurate information, they will make better decisions. That sounds reasonable, but it is incomplete.
People do not process information like machines. They process information through identity, emotion, trust, and social belonging. When a narrative threatens identity, facts can feel like an attack. When people are emotionally invested, correction can feel insulting. When trust is low, evidence is discounted because the source is assumed to be compromised.
This is why influence operations focus so heavily on trust. If you can undermine trust in institutions, media, and expertise, you can weaken the power of corrective information. If you can create the sense that “everyone lies”, then truth becomes just another weapon in a tribal conflict.
Therefore, resilience cannot be reduced to information supply. It must include cognitive resilience, emotional discipline, and institutional maturity.
The goal is not censorship. The goal is cognitive resilience.
Whenever influence operations are discussed, there is a legitimate fear that the conversation will be used to justify censorship, surveillance, or political control. In South Africa’s context, those concerns are real, and the solution must not become more damaging than the threat.
That said, rejecting censorship does not mean ignoring influence operations. It means we need a better goal.
The correct goal is cognitive resilience, the ability of institutions, political parties, media, and citizens to recognise manipulation, manage emotion responsibly, preserve trust where it is deserved, and sustain democratic participation without drifting into paranoia or cynicism.
Cognitive resilience has several components.
It requires conceptual clarity, knowing what influence operations are, how they work, and what signs to watch for. It requires institutional awareness, recognising that the cognitive domain is part of national stability and electoral integrity. It requires political maturity, where parties compete hard but do not treat societal fractures as acceptable campaign tools. It requires public literacy, in which citizens learn to notice emotional triggers, moral-urgency tactics, and false binaries.
This is not about turning citizens into analysts or demanding perfection from people under stress. It is about building a culture of disciplined sensemaking.
A necessary shift in the questions we ask
As South Africa approaches the 2026 local government elections, the core questions should expand beyond party support and campaign slogans.
We should be asking:
- Who is shaping the dominant narratives, and why are those narratives resonating now?
- Who benefits from confusion, polarisation, and mistrust?
- Which emotions are being amplified, and what behaviors do those emotions drive?
- Where is institutional trust most fragile, and how is that being exploited?
- How do communities move from frustration to mobilisation, and what narratives trigger escalation?
These are not academic questions. They are practical questions that determine stability, legitimacy, and the quality of democratic participation.
If we treat elections only as political contests, vulnerability is guaranteed. If we understand elections as cognitive contests as well, preparation becomes possible. That preparation does not require censorship. It requires seriousness.
Why this series exists
This article is the first in a series examining influence operations in the South African context, with a focus on elections and democratic resilience. The series will move from concepts to mechanisms, from vulnerabilities to actor ambiguity, and from risk analysis to practical resilience, for the state, political parties, and citizens.
The intention is not to inflame fear, or to accuse without evidence, or to turn every political disagreement into a security threat. The intention is to bring conceptual clarity to a domain that South Africa cannot afford to misunderstand.
The country has time to prepare for 2026, but that time must be used wisely. Influence operations thrive in denial, confusion, and late reaction. Resilience thrives in early clarity, calm discipline, and institutional maturity.
If South Africa wants elections that strengthen democracy rather than erode it, the cognitive domain cannot be treated as an afterthought. The contest is already underway. The only question is whether we will keep using outdated lenses to interpret it, or learn to s
Given SHINGANGE 