As the African National Congress prepared to choose its new leader on December 18, a cluster of apparently American Twitter accounts began boosting partisan messaging.

The accounts were automated “bots”, created to impersonate genuine Twitter users, and posting at sufficiently low rates to avoid automated detection. They numbered in the low hundreds.

They were not engaged in large enough numbers to swing the political decision; nor do they appear to have fundamentally reshaped the online conversation. However, their presence serves as a warning of, and primer for, likely future tactics, as South Africa heads towards presidential elections in 2019.

As with other elections across the world, South Africans can expect social media to be a propaganda and misinformation battleground, and the bot activity around the ANC’s December National Electoral Conference is a taste of what can be expected in 2018 and 2019.

The ANC contest

The ANC leadership contest was essentially a two-horse race between South Africa’s Vice-President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, former chair of the African Union Commission.

The crude figuration of the contest was that a victory for Dlamini-Zuma would have been a victory for sitting SA President Jacob Zuma (her ex-husband) and his supporters in government — some of whom stand accused of large-scale corruption.

Conversely, a victory for Ramaphosa was seen as an attempt by the ANC to self-right its course and placate disgruntled supporters, whose disdain was evidenced by the ANC’s poor results in the last municipal elections.

The two-horse race devolved into horse-trading, with Ramaphosa winning the leadership battle on December 18, but the Zuma faction filling three of the six top ANC positions available. These three have been accused of being in place to fight a rearguard action to protect Zuma from corruption charges and potential retribution.

They include, in the graphic characterization of writer Richard Poplak, “Mpumalanga Premier and gangster supreme David Mabuza,” and Ace Magashule, “a politician so fundamentally unsuitable that he’d be a caricature in a 1930s Hollywood gangster flick”.

And in fact, the #ANC54 conference, as it’s known, is still not quite finalized: 68 delegates whose votes were excluded have mounted a legal challenge to be reinstated.

Ahead of the leadership vote, there were concerns that Twitter traffic could face large-scale manipulation from automated “bot” accounts — accounts which have recently played a significant role in South African politics.

In 2017, a large leak of emails (known as the #GuptaLeaks) produced evidence that an expatriate family, the Guptas, had effectively achieved control of parts of the South African government, including Zuma, using a combination of political chicanery, patronage and outright bribery. They deny all the claims.

The response, with the help of now-disgraced PR agency Bell Pottinger, included the first large-scale fake news propaganda campaign in South Africa, described by the opposition Democratic Alliance as a “hateful and divisive campaign to divide South Africa along the lines of race”.

The African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting estimated that “the network of fake news produced at least 220,000 tweets and hundreds of Facebook posts to confuse the public between July 2016 and July 2017”.

Twitter traffic: organic flows

To analyze the Twitter traffic for possible irregularities, we conducted machine scans of traffic on the two leaders’ main hashtags: #CR17 for Ramaphosa and #NDZ for Dlamini-Zuma. Each scan ran from 00:01 UTC on December 1 to 18:00 UTC on December 12.

Overall, the scans showed a largely organic pattern of activity. There was significantly more traffic on Dlamini-Zuma’s hashtag: it was used 25,165 times, compared with 13,111 uses of Ramaphosa’s. In both cases, the traffic included both supportive and hostile messaging, indicative of two sets of supporters trying to push their own message and disrupt their rival’s.

The ebb and flow of traffic on the two hashtags was very similar, and followed the news cycle in South Africa, with the highest peak for mentions of both hashtags coming on December 4, when the ANC branch in the province of KwaZulu-Natal held its own primary.