The IEC’s multifaceted shield against the AI disinformation hurricane

Countering disinformation ahead of the 2026 local elections is like being a “meteorologist in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane. We aren’t just predicting the storm any more; we are living in it.”

This keynote warning from IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya at a recent Disinformation Dialogue held in Cape Town sets the tone for the 2026 elections, where the rampant rise of generative AI has amplified risks of manufactured reality, misinformation and disinformation.

Compared with the 2024 national elections, the hyper-local context of municipal elections adds complexity and vulnerability, with results often decided by thin margins and wild rumours spreading undetected on WhatsApp groups, on smaller community media and by word of mouth.

The dialogue included delegates from the Institute for Security Studies, European Union, and embassies of Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and Lithuania. This is an indication of growing global interest in South Africa’s elections, pending a calendar date being set.

Joining other countries that were “sending a clear message to global tech giants”, Moepya said South Africa’s democracy “is not a laboratory for unregulated algorithmic experiments”.

The IEC was looking at the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act as a “blueprint for how we might categorise high-risk AI systems that aim to influence election outcomes.”

“We require the same level of transparency in Ekurhuleni as is demanded in Brussels,” said Moepya.

He declared that youth networks were on the frontline of the battle. “You are the most sophisticated consumers of media, yet you are also the primary targets.”

He appealed to media monitoring partners present at the gathering, saying: “Your role in ‘fact-checking the checkers’ has never been more vital.”

“The 2026 elections will test our resilience. But as we have shown since 1994, South Africans have a remarkable ‘nonsense detector’. Our goal is to ensure that when a citizen enters that voting booth, they are guided by their conscience and their community’s needs — not by a deepfake designed in a dark room.”

Elaborating in a follow-up interview, IEC vice-chairperson Janet Love anticipated these elections would be like “disinformation on steroids” compared with 2024.

The misinformation threat compounds the existing logistical complexity of local government elections which, for example, involve more than 4,300 ballots, versus around 20 in national polls. This very complexity has in the past been one of the targets of campaigns that seek to undermine the legitimacy of the elections by claiming voting irregularities. These attacks on the IEC are likely to again be a feature of the election information environment.

Among Love’s chief concerns is the chilling effect of rumour and disinformation — for instance, narratives disseminated through social media videos of election material stolen from warehouses purporting to be stolen votes; or electoral officials being accused of tampering while transporting empty ballot boxes to the voting station prior to its opening (“which is what the official is supposed to do”). This increases wariness among good citizens, including those who we need to take on short-term roles as officials during the elections. “In one case in the last elections, a woman in KZN was forced out of her home at three in the morning,” said Love.

The IEC’s overall response is multifaceted.

Although shifts in the digital landscape move as fast as a runaway algorithm, it is apparent that some of the key IEC upgrades emanate from the principles and guidelines for the use of digital and social media in elections in Africa, led by the IEC and launched ahead of the May 2024 elections.

These guidelines provide an implementation plan for the responsible use of social media – but everyone needs to get on board, not just the IEC.

Here are the commission’s key priority areas for its own work.

1. Ensuring tech transparency

The IEC has shifted from a “defensive” posture to “radical transparency”. Technical glitches detected in Voter Management Devices (VMDs) in 2024 have been amended with independent end-to-end testing, said Moepya. Innovations include voters verifying ward boundaries and registration status via zero-rated digital portals.

2. Social media visibility to pre-bunk disinformation

To ensure fairness and credibility, the IEC aims not just to “debunk nonsense after it surfaces, but to prebunk it”, said Love.

This means significantly increasing staffing for social media messaging, voter education, platform monitoring and adaptive engagements to make voters aware of the safeguards that the commission has put in place to ensure the integrity of the vote.

The IEC cannot engage solely with party liaison committees to make such information visible directly to voters.

The IEC has been using its e-Recruitment platform to advertise several social media-related positions to boost its presence, skills and capacity on these networks. It has also upgraded its WhatsApp channel, with plans for a podcast. “We are assembling the team to ramp up our social media engagement even more,” said Love.

3. Collaborations to strengthen rapid-response pathways

To monitor abuses and shorten deepfake detection-to-debunking time, the IEC is strengthening partnerships with media and civic groups to bolster the media monitoring support network it has built up since 2019.

In the 2024 elections, a total of 289 disinformation complaints were lodged with the Real411 platform, which was set up in a partnership with, among others, the SA National Editors Forum and Media Monitoring Africa. A Padres (Political Advertising Repository) was also developed to track political ads.

4. Strengthening the Electoral Code of Conduct

Monitoring and enforcing transparency and disclosure in party advertising on social media is tricky. Coordinated inauthentic actors (fake accounts) and paid influencer endorsements aimed at swaying public opinion are opaque and hard to detect.

The 2024 social media guidelines tackle this head-on, stating that “political parties and candidates should ensure that campaigns … are transparent and clearly attributed, including the use of paid-for-content, including influencers”.

Ahead of these elections, the IEC is considering how to deal with social media in terms of the Electoral Code of Conduct. In this regard, Love cautioned that a recent court ruling had determined that the adjudication of breaches of the Code of Conduct was in the hands of the Electoral Court and not the IEC.

Some court processes involve lengthy delays, and the Electoral Court may not have the capacity for fast-moving, high-impact social media harms.

5. Making platforms accountable and transparent

Referring to a “Social Media for Peace” framework, Moepya said that with Unesco, the IEC was “localising global principles to ensure platforms — from TikTok to encrypted services like WhatsApp — take accountability for content that incites municipal violence”.

The signed voluntary code in 2024 was insufficient, said Moepya. “Platforms must provide researchers and the IEC with real-time access to data to detect coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”

Ahead of the 2024 elections, Google, Meta (including WhatsApp and TikTok) — but not X — agreed in a signed voluntary agreement to cooperate with the IEC and partners and to report and act on patently false or violence-inciting content, or other transgressions.

Engagement yielded results: “During three months, particularly election week in 2024, we saw posts de-escalated and our info promoted — but that’s anecdotal.” Obtaining measurable figures from the platforms is like getting blood out of a stone,” she said.

6. Countering fake attacks on the IEC

In a climate of democratic recession, disinformation exploits trust deficits across state institutions, and the IEC was not spared. “When contestation is intense, the umpire (IEC) is an easy target,” said Love.

The IEC is pursuing initiatives beyond election info, emphasising transparency, verification, auditing and pre-bunking attacks.

“We saw in 2024 that the commission became the focal point, with accusations of manipulating results, among other attacks. Aside from two cases which have yet to be decided, the courts have found in favour of the commission on around 40 occasions.” DM

Janet Heard is a Cape Town-based journalist and a former editor at Daily Maverick.

In the build-up to the local elections, this is the first scene-setter in an Election Watch series by the Centre for Information Integrity in Africa (CINIA) at Stellenbosch University. CINIA forms part of the Local Elections Media Observatory network, which monitors, analyses risks and supports mitigation for these elections. CINIA will also join the Partnership on Information Integrity in Elections (PIIE). Partners include Moxii Africa, SANEF, Africa Check, the IEC and others. PIIE launches at the Human Rights Festival this month.

Follow CINIA’s work here.