South Africa: Who’s Behind 16 Days of Activism Online?

The 16 Days of Activism campaign was led by government and business accounts on South Africa X (formerly Twitter), according to a new report published by the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change (CABC).

The report looked at the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children campaign between 25 November and 10 December 2024.

According to the CABC, three dominant hashtags constituted 25% of the entire conversation on the 3rd of December. Several hashtags dominated the conversation, such as #EndGBVF, #16DaysofActivism, and #FinancialAbuse.

Many of the posts using #EndGBVF were from government accounts and businesses promoting their efforts to end GBV in the country. “Several authors posted and shared Spar’s initiatives to combat GBV,” reports CABC.

Under this hashtag, #16DaysofActivism posts were predominantly from the South African Police Service who provided updates on their efforts and initiatives aimed at tackling gender-based violence.

Nedbank used the hashtag #FinanciallAbuse to shed light on the issue of financial abuse, its signs, and its effects on relationships. The initiative is commendable since it allows South Africans to obtain information about different types of abuse that they may not be aware of or have the language to discuss.

According to the report posts with the highest engagement during 16 Days of Activism were mostly unrelated to the campaign. The 16 Days of Activism content did not make CABC’s Social Media Analytics Report 7’s top 10.

The researchers said that a shift from the 16 Days of Activism discussion in 2023, with more posts calling for accountability on abuse and parenting issues. Two posts depict this, one in which a father allegedly handed his son over to the authorities after discovering that he had committed a crime, and another in which a group of men protected a woman fleeing from her abusive partner.

There were also posts calling out abuse and poor treatment of a spouse, a shift from the 16 Days of Activism period of 2023.

The CABC reports that content and conversations related to 16 Days continue to be led by the government or businesses in a top-down approach and are not naturally occurring in the vast majority of data points collected. The CABC excluded influence, government, or business-related accounts in order to isolate naturally occurring individual expressions in order to test and strengthen the aforementioned proposition. Individual expressions refer to those accounts with a followership of less than 10,000 individuals.

However, the CABC found a variety of 16 Days content during the reporting period.

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