South Africa’s post-apartheid context, with its persistent inequalities, racialised tensions, and evolving online mobilisations, makes it a critical site for understanding how the proliferation of this harmful online content affects everyday democratic life, and how inclusive, context-specific governance can support rights-based interventions in the public interest.
The forthcoming report, When harm goes viral: Governing online harm and platform power examines three interlinked areas of harm that define South Africa’s online and offline conflict environment: Gender-based violence (GBV), xenophobia and elections. Within each area, the report combines secondary research, social media analysis, legal and policy evaluation, and primary stakeholder research to show platforms’ role in amplifying the rapid spread of hate speech, mis-, dis-, and mal-information, coordinated mobilisation, and gendered, racialised, and anti-democratic violence.
Carried out by Research ICT Africa, the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change, and Moxii Africa, the research examines harmful online content from three complementary perspectives: how online harms manifest in South Africa, how they are governed through law, regulation, and platform systems, and how affected stakeholders and institutions experience these governance arrangements.
Early findings confirm that current legal and regulatory frameworks, designed largely for analogue communication, remain ill-equipped to address the speed, scale, multilingual character, and contextual nuance of online harm, particularly where global platform moderation fails to account for local context. Thus, the report argues that addressing this requires not just additional content restriction, but a coordinated, rights-based governance ecosystem spanning government, regulators, platforms, civil society and communities, so that digital technologies strengthen rather than undermine democratic participation, social cohesion and human rights protection in South Africa.
Comparing the country’s national systems with international human rights standards such as UNESCO Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms, the report assesses how South Africa interprets and applies the following five dimensions to mitigate harmful online content, while emphasising the importance of context-specific interventions across each dimension:
- Human rights due diligence;
- Transparency and access to information;
- Local linguistic and contextual capacity;
- Accountability and effective remedy; and
- Meaningful multistakeholder participation.
The recommendations of the study prioritise coordination across government, regulators, platforms and civil society, while recognising that different harms require differentiated responses. They seek to strengthen implementation and accountability within the existing governance architecture, while identifying areas where further regulatory intervention may be warranted.
This study extends UNESCO’s global Social Media 4 Peace initiative into South Africa, examining how digital platforms shape freedom of expression, hate speech and content governance in one of the world’s most socially complex and politically significant digital landscapes. The research aims to build whole-of-society capacity for rights-based digital governance, deepen understanding of how harmful content affects marginalised communities, and produce practical recommendations adaptable to other African contexts, while contributing to South-South learning within UNESCO’s broader digital governance agenda.
