With the wheels already turning towards South Africa's sixth democratic general election, we need to be wary of manipulative tactics and the dark arts shaping the national discourse and altering voter sentiment.
The Gupta-Bell Pottinger project, which radicalised debate and heightened racial tensions, exposed how vulnerable our society is to manipulation because of inequalities and systemic problems.
Over the past few weeks, the issue of land expropriation without compensation has already sent us down the rabbit hole. When parliament considers a constitutional amendment as a means to fast-track land redistribution, it remains to be seen whether our society will be able to deal with the issue rationally or whether things will spiral out of control.
Our elections so far have not really been defined by bread and butter issues - liberation-era loyalties, personality politics and the ANC's leadership problems have been major influences on how people have voted.But we now have a more engaged society, old allegiances have subsided or been eroded, and a large proportion of the electorate are younger people who want their votes to have meaningful impact on their lives.
According to the Independent Electoral Commission's registration statistics this week, out of the 26.2million people registered to vote, women outnumber men by almost three million. The age group with the highest number of voters are people between the ages of 30 and 39.
Political parties need to think through and diversify their election messaging to make sense to their target audiences. The ideological claptrap and negative campaigning prevalent in previous elections will probably fall flat this time.
But while it is important for parties to understand their constituencies, we must be on guard for subversive tactics to exploit voters' fears and vulnerabilities.
One of the scariest things about covering the 2016 US presidential elections was witnessing the misinformation and deception, and how convinced some voters were about absolute rubbish. Interviewing frenetic people at Trump-Pence rallies proved to be a test of self-restraint - it was difficult not to laugh at their ridiculous claims, blurt out profanities or recommend that they see a medical professional.The claims included that Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton had murdered people in the White House when she was first lady and stashed the bodies in secret bunkers, that there was a secret plot to spread Islam in schools that would lead to the eventual abolition of Christianity, and that thousands of "Mexican rapists" were crossing the border to impregnate American women so that "cross-breeds" could outnumber "real Americans".
All this misinformation appeared to have been spread via social media, especially Facebook, as part of the Trump propaganda machinery to get Americans to fear "the other".
Donald Trump was apparently the antidote to defend and protect "real Americans". Of course there were also people who did not need help forming ludicrous opinions. One woman told me with conviction that Trump was just a "man with needs", and that his outrageous "grab them by the pussy" remarks, captured in the Access Hollywood recording, were "normal guy talk".
"Honey, even your man says that about you when you're not there," she winked at me.
Over the past few days, it has been revealed that there was a whole other layer of manipulation. A whistleblower exposed how 50million Facebook users' data was used to weaponise the US elections, and that data was harvested to manipulate the Brexit vote, as well as elections in Nigeria and Trinidad.
According to Christopher Wylie, a former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm used information from people's Facebook profiles to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. While Facebook discovered the unprecedented data breach in 2015, it did not alert its users and took limited steps to recover and secure the private information.Wylie also claimed that a super political action committee run by Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, used Cambridge Analytica to make Americans "more militaristic in their views".
This means that the manipulation could have had the effect of threatening global security. It would be naive to think that because Bell Pottinger's dastardly acts were exposed and we managed to crush the international PR firm for its devious work in South Africa, the threat of deception no longer exists.
Long after the Bell Pottinger contract ended and its mandate from the Guptas was exposed, online campaigns continued. These included campaigns to discredit now President Cyril Ramaphosa, harassment of journalists and the onslaught against "white monopoly capital".
This was to conceal the state capture project and influence the outcome of the ANC presidential race. With the shambles in the Department of State Security and crime intelligence, we have no idea whether underhand cyber tactics will be used to influence voter sentiment in the upcoming national elections.But we have already seen how quickly people can be triggered on social media to attack journalists and political opponents.
We must not be caught off-guard on the weaponisation of data and employment of dark arts to create unthinkable election outcomes...