Our Process

In response to these emerging internal and external threats to socio-political cohesion in South Africa, the CABC team’s actively:

1 Track and counter (in real-time) mis- and disinformation, coordinated narrative manipulation, polarising and divisive rhetoric, hate speech, extremism and incitements to public unrest and violence;
2 Disseminate fact and evidence-based information, media communications and creative content (i.e. print, radio and television) and
3 Engage in online dialoguing on (public and private) social media platforms and mobilise influencers and empower them to amplify positive messaging.

We have worked on a variety of social themes spanning: Covid-19, racism, extremism, xenophobia, public unrest, misogyny and gender-based violence.

Through technological advancements in cutting-edge social media analytics it has become possible to quickly, and at scale, identify people who share certain interests and values, including both progressive and anti-social stances on any thematic domain. We are able to engage, empower and amplify these progressive voices. Our programmes have the power to reach millions of people at unprecedented scale.

We have launched various multi-media projects that aim to work towards solving crucial issues affecting our society. This is where the benefit of a strong interdisciplinary organisation comes in, because we can look at each challenge in its own context and with the right members of our team, devise and design bespoke intervention strategies to solve these unique problems in a relevant, impactful way.

Our countermeasures are therefore strategic, creative, targeted, and substantially amplified

Through our social media narrative analytics and advanced network analytics, we also produce communications, generate creative and insightful content (that educates or raises awareness), and we conduct online dialoguing and academic research.

This means every aspect of our work has a foundation of strong, expert-driven evidence-based information for high-impact results.

The CABC has three key processes that guide our work:

1. Insights;
2. Action; and
3. Impact

1) Insights

Our team of highly trained analysts use cutting-edge analytical tools to isolate social media conversations of social import. From this data set, we conduct data and narrative analysis to analyse and predict trends over time on any issue. We then conduct a Micro Analysis of the data. This allows us to see all the micro narratives that exist within a given conversation. From this we develop a range of key Insights. We can gain insights from the range of reasons that people use to justify their views or behaviour on an issue. We publish the findings of our insights. development process.

2) Action

At the heart of Action are our citizen activists and our dialogue facilitators. We use a crowd-sourcing model to find activists. In the analysis of every conversation, we are able to identify people speaking on each side of the conversation ie: antagonists and protagonists. The protagonists are our allies, our citizen activists – those who are value aligned, and are already speaking in the conversation.

Our dialogue facilitators are in-house interns trained in dialogical skills and conflict mediation who develop, nurture and curate our bank of citizen activists. They provide content, context and contacts, assist them to amplify and make their message more effective on social media. Closely aligned to this process is the development of strategy aligned content to amplify our message.

3) Impact

The Impact component speaks to the higher order impact we hope to achieve through our work. We aim to create better informed citizens, develop an active citizenry, and to achieve narrative change in key social media conversations and broadly in society. We aim to achieve behavioural change around social prejudices and a range of other issues.

We provide rigorous Monitoring, Measurement and Evaluation through analysing and reporting on changes in the conversation over time; analysing the social media-based behaviour of our citizen activists and reporting on the reach and impact of all of our content.