DIGITAL POLITICS OP-ED: Borders, ballots, court clashes — how the anti-immigrant movement is setting SA’s elections agenda

Three weeks before the 4 November local elections, the anti-foreigner movement reclaimed South Africa’s online political conversation. A Home Affairs U-turn on asylum and a News24 investigation gave it fresh momentum. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court put the ANC back on the ballot.

Between Friday, 9 October and Thursday, 15 October 2026, Murmur Intelligence tracked political conversation across X and popular public Facebook pages. On X, about 920,000 posts were authored by, or posted about, South African parties, institutions and politicians.

The anti-foreigner movement takes back first place

As expected, the White Cross Project surge of two weeks ago proved temporary. Two anti-immigration communities now produced 43% of all posts on X from 24% of accounts, and they again had the highest buzzer scores of the large communities, a sign of sustained coordinated amplification (note how the users in red cluster around March and March’s Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s account in the below network visualisation).

The trigger was Home Affairs’ withdrawal of its online asylum directive. Ngobese-Zuma told followers the directive was gone but the Constitutional Court judgment was not, and her network, echoed by Busisiwe Mkhwebane, pushed for a referendum and withdrawal from the 1951 Refugee Convention. 

When News24 reported on her tenders and funding, #HandsOffJacinta and #WeAreJacinta followed, with ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba and MK accounts rallying to her. On Facebook, Operation Dudula ran the third most-engaged political page, behind SABC News and SAPS.

Afrikaner activists: Back to rural safety

The Afrikaner rights community fell from 24% of posts two weeks ago to 13%. Its buzzer score stayed among the lowest in the network, consistent with passionate activism rather than manufactured reach. It is only when Elon Musk and the American Maga community amplify this community’s content – like when President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House in early 2025 – that we see unusual amplification patterns around this community’s content.

Its focus shifted from Washington to home: farm attacks, attacks on the Constitutional Court ANC candidates list ruling, and defending Ngobese-Zuma against News24, drawing it closer to the anti-immigrant movement (which is not surprising given that AfriForum and March and March are now formally aligned).

The EFF and the MK party

The EFF supporters community produced 8.5% of posts on X, down from 14% two weeks ago and 9% last week. Its campaign was conventional: the announcement of a closing rally at Orlando Stadium on 31 October and Tlaleng Mofokeng’s Johannesburg mayoral bid. EFF voices also condemned xenophobic vigilantism.

RET and MK party supporters held steady at 6.4% of posts from 3.7% of accounts. They mobilised in Durban under #SizothathaOmaspala, defended Ngobese-Zuma and, led by Mzwanele Manyi, cast the ANC’s court win as evidence of Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) and judicial bias.

Inside the GNU: the courts as campaign ground

The ANC’s biggest win came in court. The Constitutional Court upheld its appeal relating to the ANC’s missing the IEC candidate submission deadline. The court ordered the IEC to include the ANC’s candidate lists in six municipalities. 

The FF Plus’s Corné Mulder called it “a very controversial ruling”, and AfriForum-aligned voices called the court “packed with pro-ANC judges”. On Facebook, the ANC-IEC saga trended through IOL, SABC News and ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula’s page (Mbalula gave a very emotional statement after the ruling that went viral).

The DA was squeezed from both sides. The asylum U-turn under its Home Affairs minister, Leon Schreiber, drew fire from the ATM’s Vuyo Zungula and anti-immigrant accounts, while Helen Zille insisted the DA would not back down over Mbalula’s threats to review the GNU. On Facebook, the party leaned on rallies and law-and-order messaging from JP Smith and Cilliers Brink.

The government’s most-shared good news was Navi Pillay’s Nobel peace prize.

Paid influencers: from state entities to a named candidate

Suspected undisclosed paid public-sector campaigns continued to run this past week. The Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) again ran undisclosed bursts, selling R20 tickets for fan trains to the MTN8 final and its new City to City buses (hundreds of posts, none marked as advertising). 

For the first time this month, a campaign relating to a specific politician surfaced. On 10 October @mizar_rr and several others posted #TlangiMogaleForANCMayor, backing Tshwane MMC Tlangi Mogale as the ANC’s mayoral candidate. Within hours Mogale (@tlangimich) publicly denied paying for support, after Miss Ziprusha (@destinyzee), in a post since deleted, said she had been paid to post.

Posts around the #TlaniMogaleForANCMayor saga.

Smaller pushes promoted an SA Local Government Association summit. Twenty-seven accounts wrote for both political and brand campaigns, disclosing #ad for Samsung, the National Lottery and Betway, but not for Prasa or the ANC mayoral push. 

One of the potentially paid campaigns highlighted this wave is for a podcast promoting South Africa and US relations. The Guardian recently published that the US State Department is considering spending millions of rand on a marketing campaign to encourage Afrikaners to emigrate to that country, so expect to see more of this kind of content amplified in future.

Posts promoting the African Renaissance podcast on South Africa-US relations.

Wrapping it all up

Two weeks ago we expected the Afrikaner surge to recede and the anti-immigrant movement to endure. Both happened, and the anti-immigrant movement is now setting the election agenda: it extracted a policy reversal, and parties from ActionSA to MK are competing for its support. The courts have become campaign ground, with rulings on asylum and ballot lists turned into rallying points. 

And paid amplification appears to be moving from state entities to individual candidates. DM

Aldu Cornelissen is a pioneer in AI-driven pipelines and analytics of complex unstructured data, and is the technical mind and co-founder of Murmur Intelligence and LLMEKNOW, both Cape Town-based organisations.

Kyle Findlay is a renowned researcher and speaker on the topic of digital influence and is the co-founder of Murmur Intelligence and LLMEKNOW.