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.
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