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.
Given SHINGANGE 