A story claiming that a young mother had given birth to ten live babies in a Pretoria hospital in 2021 – which would have been a world record – not only captured the national imagination but also reverberated throughout the world when it was picked up by international broadcasters and other media. But, as it turned out, it was all a hoax.

That was not the first time South Africans had been subjected to what is now widely known as fake news. The fictitious stories about a so-called rogue unit at the South African Revenue Service easily come to mind. So too does the media coverage orchestrated by the now defunct UK-based public relations firm Bell Pottinger that was meant to launder the image of the Gupta brothers as their grand scheme to capture the South African State began to come to light. The narrative pushed by Bell Pottinger was meant to paint the Guptas and former President Jacob Zuma – with whom they were alleged to have a corrupt relationship – as victims of ‘white monopoly capital’.

The bottom line is that there is a growing tendency – in this country and elsewhere – for politicians and other individuals to plant false stories in the media, mostly for political, ideological or economic ends. The intention is clear – to deceive – and the false information that is peddled is packaged as news because the bad guys behind fake news are aware that journalists’ news production norms lend tons of credibility to what they write.

Expressed differently, fake news is disinformation that mimics journalism, and is distinct from misinformation, which is when journalists inadvertently publish false news. It’s also not mal-information, or the divulging of private information to harm individuals or institutions, which, in some cases, is the motive behind some media exposés.

But let’s leave misinformation and mal- information and stick with fake news. My sense is that, as the 2024 elections approach, we are going to see more and more of it. This may range from news stories that are doctored to blend truth and fiction so as to ignite public outrage and mistrust of political opponents, to misleading social media posts, deep fakes and naked propaganda.

As evidence from across the globe has shown, fake news thrives where there are existing social and political divisions, which is a fairly legitimate characterisation of South Africa, despite the miracle that was the 1994 transition and the efforts of successive governments ever since to mould a truly united Rainbow Nation.

That fake news is detrimental to democracy is not a figment of people’s imagination, with a 2021 report revealing that the phenomenon has become a pervasive and dangerous threat in many countries, including South Africa. What’s more, a survey conducted by research consultancy Ipsos for the Canada-headquartered Centre for International Governance Innovation found that 86% of readers of online information – including news websites, social media posts and blogs – believe they have been exposed to fake news and initially believed it was genuine news.

Fake news is not a twenty-first-century- only phenomenon, being as old as journalism itself. Perhaps its most notorious incarnation – in the pre-Donald Trump era, of course – was a story, initially published by two British newspapers in 1917, that claimed that the Germans were boiling down the corpses of their soldiers killed in the First World War, which was raging at that time, to extract human fats for use in the manufacture of soap, lubricants and fertiliser. By the time the British Parliament declared the story to be false in December 1925, it had been repeated as factual 37 times in Britain, 75 times in the US and 84 times in Australia.

Just like fake news nowadays, the so-called corpse factory story dented media credibility big time – to the extent that, when the Nazis’ excesses against Jews first came to light, news reports about them were initially disbelieved, which possibly delayed international intervention.

The advent of the digital era has reinvented fake news in that just about anyone with access to the Internet can convey his or her version of the truth, making the potential for fake news infinite. The ‘filter bubbles’ created by newsfeed algorithms have not helped the situation, as many people are only exposed to customised online news and are shielded from other news that may debunk any fake news in their repertoire.