South Africans on Twitter are witnessing the rise of an influential anti-immigrant lobby and thousands, captured by a make-believe character, ‘Lerato Pillay’, have unwittingly become complicit in the explosion of a weaponised conversation. Now, an analysis of the social media conversation by the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change has deemed uLerato to be part of a ‘dangerously orchestrated narrative’ that has affected at least 50,000 accounts so far.