This project extends UNESCO’s Social Media 4 Peace initiative into South Africa, generating new evidence on freedom of expression, hate speech, and content governance in one of the world’s most socially complex and politically significant digital landscapes. South Africa’s post-apartheid context, with its persistent inequalities, racialised tensions, and evolving online mobilisations, makes it a critical site for understanding how harmful content affects democratic life and how governance structures can be made more inclusive and rights-based.
Research Objectives
The project aims to deliver a comprehensive analysis of South Africa’s digital governance landscape to support freedom of expression and mitigate harmful content. By strengthening collaboration between government, platforms, civil society, and communities, it will build civil society’s capacity to advocate for rights-based digital governance while also deepening shared understanding of how harmful content affects marginalised groups in South Africa. In response, this project will offer practical, community-centred resilience strategies based on a co-developed methodology and knowledge base that can be made adaptable to other African contexts. The result will enhance South–South learning and effectively contribute to UNESCO’s global digital governance ecosystem.
The project will fulfil these objectives by:
- Evaluating the effectiveness of legal and regulatory frameworks in protecting freedom of expression while addressing harmful content.
- Assessing platform governance practices, including content moderation, transparency, and enforcement, in the South African context.
- Examining user empowerment tools such as media literacy, civic education, and technological interventions.
- Developing rights-based, multistakeholder recommendations for governing harmful online content.
Methodology
The project employs a mixed-methods design combining a comprehensive desk review, social media analytics, and extensive stakeholder engagement. RIA will lead a literature review of South Africa’s digital media landscape, an analysis of historical conflict dynamics, legal and constitutional frameworks, platform policies, civil society initiatives, and alignment with international standards. CABC will conduct social media analytics, including a four-year review of harmful content trends, real-time monitoring, visual dashboards, and pattern analysis. Moxii will lead stakeholder engagement through 30+ key informant interviews across government, civil society, legal experts, platforms, media, academia, community leaders, youth, and women’s groups, as well as six focus groups across provinces with multilingual facilitation and focused attention to marginalised communities.
