Imagine waking up on election morning in South Africa. You reach for your phone, and before your coffee, a WhatsApp voice note tells you that voting stations in your area have been moved—or that your ballot won’t be secret if you vote for a certain candidate. It sounds official. It sounds urgent. And it is completely false. This is the new reality of local government elections in South Africa, where disinformation has become as much a part of the campaign trail as loudhailers and T-shirts. With the November 4 local government elections fast approaching, the Electoral Commission of South Africa has introduced an Electoral Code of Conduct Countering Disinformation. The code is an attempt to curb the spread of false and misleading information by political parties and candidates. It arrives amid growing public concern about the influence of social media, manipulated images and videos, and artificial intelligence on voters. People are worried, and rightly so. The information environment has become crowded, confusing and often deliberately deceptive. The IEC says the new code is meant to strengthen the integrity of the elections and ensure that political parties and candidates take responsibility for what they put into the world. On paper, it sounds like a step forward. But whether it can actually protect voters is another question. Civil society groups and media watchdogs have responded with caution, arguing that the code is too weak, too slow and too narrowly focused. One of the most outspoken voices has been Right2Know, a South African organisation that fights for access to information and freedom of expression. Its national communication coordinator, Yolanda Yalezo, has called out the code’s limits. She says the plan may sound good in a press release, but it will not stop the lies moving through private groups and encrypted messaging apps. It will not hold anyone accountable for the damage done before a retraction is published. And it might even create a false sense of security among voters who assume that the election process is protected just because a code exists. The real challenge, she argues, is much bigger than political parties making false statements. It is about the entire ecosystem of misinformation, and that is exactly where the code falls short.
The core of the IEC’s new code is a simple enough idea: make political actors responsible for the falsehoods they spread. Under the rules, if a party or candidate posts, shares, or repeats information that is found to be false or misleading, they have 36 hours to publicly retract it and correct the record. The intention is to create a fast, visible mechanism for accountability, one that forces campaigns to clean up their own messes before the damage becomes irreversible. The IEC has framed this as a matter of election integrity. In a democracy, voters deserve accurate information when they choose their leaders. If parties weaponise lies, then the outcome of the election cannot truly reflect the will of the people. The code also sends a signal that the electoral commission is paying attention to the digital battlefield, where memes, manipulated videos and viral slogans often matter more than policy documents. It acknowledges that the old ways of monitoring campaigns—leaflets, posters, rallies—are no longer enough. But for critics, the 36-hour window reveals how out of step the regulations are with the speed of modern communication. If a false rumour is planted at 8 a.m., it can be forwarded to thousands of community WhatsApp groups by lunchtime. It can be clipped, edited, and reposted on TikTok before the original poster has even checked their notifications. It can be picked up by a radio station or a podcast by the evening. By the time 36 hours have passed, the lie has already settled into people’s minds. Even if the party issues a correction, many of those who saw the lie will never see the correction. The same algorithm that amplified the falsehood will not bring the truth back to the top of their feed. Yalezo put it bluntly in her interview with Jacaranda FM Newswatch: if you really want to deter fake news in local elections, you cannot treat it like a defamation case. It is not a slow legal dispute between two parties. It is more like a contagious outbreak, spreading rapidly and silently, and it needs to be treated with the urgency of a public health emergency. A 36-hour withdrawal note, she argues, is not a response. It is an afterthought. Worse, the code only asks for retraction, not for prevention. It does not require parties to verify information before sharing it, nor does it impose any meaningful penalty for a lie that has already done its rounds. It simply offers a correction mechanism that feels more like a legal formality than real protection.
Yalezo’s deeper concern is that the code is aimed at the wrong people. It assumes that disinformation in South African elections is mostly manufactured by political parties and their candidates. But in reality, a great deal of false information spreads organically—through ordinary people who do not belong to any party, through innocent forwards and shares, through family group chats and community pages. A voter might share a message about a stolen electricity meter or a fake housing list without knowing that it was invented by someone with a political agenda. Another voter might edit a photo of a local councillor to make them look absent or corrupt, simply because they are angry. WhatsApp, in particular, is a black box for information controls. Messages are encrypted, private and often impossible to trace. TikTok, with its short videos and trending sounds, can turn a baseless rumour into a national talking point in a matter of hours. In this environment, requiring parties to retract their own statements misses the point. The lies are not always coming from the parties. They are coming from the crowd. And the crowd is not bound by any electoral code. This is why Yalezo says the new rules will affect local government elections very little. They will not stop fake news, because fake news does not need permission or an official account to thrive. They will not create accountability for the things that political parties say to put themselves out there in the face of people, simply because they want to win. Parties know that a retraction issued after the damage is done is not a real penalty; it is a formality. And in some cases, the retraction itself can even be weaponised. A party can float a false accusation, wait for it to go viral, then issue a quiet correction—confident that the lie has already done its work. The voters who needed to see the correction are not paying attention. This is not an accident. It is how modern political communication works. The truth is slow and careful. The lie is fast and sticky. And by the time the truth catches up, the story has already changed. Yalezo’s point is not that parties should escape accountability. It is that accountability cannot stop at the party gate. It has to reach the entire chain of amplification—the platforms, the influencers, the group admins, the people who hit forward without thinking. Without that, any code is just a piece of paper.
So what needs to happen instead? Yalezo offers a clear starting point: punish the amplifier, not just the speaker. If the goal is to stop false information from circulating, focusing on the source is not enough. In a media environment where a single lie can be amplified by thousands of people who genuinely believe it, the damage is multiplied by the network. The people and platforms that help a lie travel faster than the truth must also be held responsible. That means the IEC should have binding agreements with technology companies—the Metas, the TikToks, the Googles of the world—before election season begins. These agreements should not be optional or vague. They need to include specific commitments. If a piece of content is ruled false by an independent body or by the electoral commission itself, that content should be labelled quickly and clearly. It should be downranked so that it stops appearing in news feeds and recommendations. It should be stopped from being forwarded, particularly in messaging apps where chain-messages spread like wildfire. Yalezo describes this as pre-banking information: preparing systems in advance so that they are ready to respond the moment a lie appears, rather than waiting for the chaos and then trying to clean it up. She is particularly critical of the reactive mindset that governs electoral regulation. Too often, the authorities spend all their energy on punishing lies after they have already spread. They hold press conferences, issue statements, and launch fact-checking websites. But by then, the lie has already entered the minds of thousands, maybe millions, of voters. The correction comes too late. The trust is already broken. In a public health emergency, you do not wait for the disease to spread before you act. You vaccinate. You isolate. You trace contacts. You flood the public with clear, simple guidance. Electoral misinformation should be handled the same way. That means working with platforms before the election, not after. It means building rapid-response mechanisms that can flag and stop false content within hours, not days. It means acknowledging that the real enemy is not a single partisan lie, but the infrastructure that allows lies to travel at machine speed. Without that, Yalezo argues, the IEC will always be one step behind.
Beyond platforms, Yalezo believes the electoral commission has a much bigger responsibility: to teach, not just police. She argues that too much energy is wasted on chasing misinformation after it appears, while too little is invested in preventing it from taking hold in the first place. Voter education, done properly, is the most powerful tool against disinformation. If people already understand how the ballot works, how votes are counted and where their voting stations are, they are far less likely to fall for the fake announcements and false instructions that circulate online. Yalezo’s message is that the IEC should be flooding communities right now with simple, factual, accessible information. Not legalistic documents. Not technical explanations. Not jargon-filled pages on a website. Real information that reaches people where they are—on radio, in community meetings, through street-level campaigns and social media. If voters know the basics in advance, an anonymous message cannot shake them as easily. But voter education is not just the IEC’s job. It is also a personal responsibility. Yalezo urged every voter to verify information before sharing it and to rely on official sources when checking claims. That may sound obvious, but the instinct to share something shocking or exciting is almost impossible to resist. A single click can spread a lie before the mind has time to question it. She calls on voters to be more careful, more curious, and more trusting of official channels. And she reminds them that local elections are not about national dramas or viral controversies. They are about the basic realities of everyday life: water, electricity, potholes, housing. The people who win seats on municipal councils will decide whether your street gets repaired, whether your tap runs, whether your lights stay on. That is the real issue. And no viral lie, no matter how convincing, can change the truth of what you live every day. Her line is worth repeating: no WhatsApp message knows your street better than you do. You know what you need. You know which roads are broken. You know whether the water has been off for a week. So do not let a stranger’s lie tell you what to think about your own community. Trust, but verify. Use the official platforms. Check the facts. Then vote on your lived reality, not on a viral lie.
South Africa’s local government elections on November 4 will be a test not only of political leadership but of the country’s ability to hold a free and fair democratic process in the age of digital confusion. The IEC’s new code of conduct is an acknowledgement that the old rules are no longer enough, but as the debate around it shows, acknowledging a problem is not the same as solving it. Disinformation is not a problem that can be fixed with a single document. It is a structural challenge, woven into the way people communicate, the way algorithms work, and the way political power is won and lost. The conversation sparked by Yalezo and Right2Know is essential. It reminds us that the fight against fake news is not about censorship or silencing critics. It is about ensuring that voters can decide based on what is real. It is about making sure that a community which has spent years fighting for basic services is not distracted by a viral lie. It is about understanding that in a local election, the stakes are personal. The person you vote for will have power over your street, your water, your electricity, your neighbourhood. That is too important to be left to the mercy of disinformation. The code may not be perfect. It may not be fast enough. It may not contain the platform accountability that many are demanding. But it has started a conversation. And that conversation must continue, in communities, in newsrooms, in party meetings, and inside the electoral commission. Ultimately, the integrity of South Africa’s democratic process does not rest only on the IEC. It rests on every voter who refuses to share a rumour without checking it. Every community leader who corrects false information with patience. Every journalist who keeps asking hard questions. Every platform that takes responsibility for what it amplifies. Democracy is not a machine that runs on its own. It is a human project, and it depends on the choices we make every day. As the election draws near, the best defence against disinformation is not a code of conduct. It is a public that refuses to be fooled. That means paying attention, verifying sources, and remembering that the most important truth is the one you can see outside your own window. Vote on your lived reality. Let the lies die of neglect.