‘Black Nationalist’ account threatens Adriaan Basson’s family

News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson was threatened by a Twitter account going by the name of Black Nationalist saying: “I will love to put my hands on your son or daughter if you have [one] to prove a point to whites.”

“Nice. New bot accounts popping up to spew hate and violence. Let’s put @Twitter to the test,” was his response.

It seems the test worked, as the account has since been “temporarily restricted”.

The account may indeed have been a bot, or just an individual tweeting anonymously.

The Citizen reported in October that trolls, sockpuppets (fake accounts), and bots were a problem in South Africa, and may even be linked to targeted interference into South African politics.

Organised political interference on social media has been found to have manipulated the results of elections in a number of countries. According to Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, there is evidence of social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries.

South Africa is “definitely” one of them, according to a report released by data analyst Kyle Findlay which attempts to analyse “who might be involved” in manipulating social media “and what their agendas are”.

He identified three main groups as being prone to manipulation, the “pro-EFF”, “pro-radical economic transformation (RET)”, and “international far right” since these groups have had the most members suspended by Twitter for suspicious activity, according to the study.

READ MORE: EFF member threatens to kill Adriaan Basson in ‘support’ of Mngxitama

Of the pro-EFF users suspended, Findlay said the presence of bots was harder to determine than in the case of the RET and far-right groups.

“It’s hard to tell if they are real users that are being suspended for their divisive content or orchestrated fake accounts,” he writes.

Adriaan Basson has become increasingly critical of the EFF this year, which has led to threats from the party and its supporters.

The Citizen reported on Wednesday that @tsk_tsheko, a Twitter user known as an EFF supporter, took to Twitter on Tuesday to threaten to slaughter “white animals” and to kill “people like” Basson in response to an article the editor-in-chief had written about BLF leader Andile Mngixtama.

He once had a better relationship with the party and its leader, writing a column in November claiming Malema used to call him with tip-offs.

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