Monitoring group logs 79 potentially harmful election posts in a week, most of them on X
The Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change says one post urged people to gather at voting stations on 4 November to prevent foreign nationals from voting. It stresses that its findings are provisional.
By Staff Reporter · Published
DEVELOPING. A social-media monitoring group has logged 79 potentially harmful posts about the local government elections in a single week.
The Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change (CABC) logged 79 potentially harmful posts about the elections between 22 and 29 October, 77 of them on X. One urged people to gather at voting stations on 4 November to prevent foreign nationals from voting. The CABC said its classifications were provisional and did not establish organised intimidation or impending violence.
- What changed: the CABC has published a factsheet on online election conversations between 22 and 29 October.
- Who is affected: voters, election staff and foreign nationals living near voting stations.
- What you can do: check claims about voting against the IEC’s own statements before sharing them, and report threats to the police on 10111.
- The CABC tagged 51 entries as mis- or disinformation, 33 as hate speech and 12 as incitement. An entry can carry more than one tag.
- Of the 79 entries, 77 were on X, one on TikTok and one on Facebook.
- Together they drew “approximately 546 600 views, 29 600 likes, 4 100 shares and 1 350 comments”, according to the factsheet.
- The post urging people to gather at voting stations had 3,366 logged views.
- Whether the posts are linked to one another. The CABC says its findings “do not establish organised intimidation or impending violence”.
- How much the monitoring reflects platforms other than X. The CABC says its data is “heavily weighted towards X”.
We are not linking to or reproducing the posts. We will report further CABC findings, and any police or IEC response, as they are published.
- CABC factsheet, 22–29 October 2026 (PDF): cabc.org.za
- CABC summary page, 31 October: cabc.org.za
- 10:50, 3 November: first version, checked against the CABC factsheet.
Official source: https://cabc.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/LGE-2026-Factsheet-1.pdf
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