FORMER president Jacob Zuma’s daughter Duduzile’s Twitter account was used to ramp up the July unrest.
This is according to Jean le Roux from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Le Roux testified at the South African Human Rights Commission’s hearings into the July unrest on Wednesday, 2 March.
He said Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla’s account was one of the most vocal.
“Hers was one of the accounts that was mostly engaged in the most celebratory parts,” said Le Roux.
He was referring to a post he said celebrated the unrest.
“She [Duduzile] would post buildings burning and have a tweet below that and say ‘amandla, we see you’ and did this throughout the period of the unrest,” said Le Roux.
He said in some cases, she took photos from a year before and attached the same statement, giving the impression that they were from the protests in support of her father.
Le Roux said the accounts they looked at didn’t show any evidence of incitement to violence on open source media such as Twitter or Facebook.
“We were specifically looking at whether they were concrete examples of incitement. We were looking at whether there was a call to go to a place and conduct arson and to loot,” he told the commission.
He said most of the posts were reaction to events.
“These were people who used the unrest for their political objectives. There were many uses of ‘we see you’ posts that were used as a way of celebrating what was happening in KZN.”
He said if there was direct incitement, that would have happened on the closed source platforms such as Whats-App, Telegram and Signal.
