Icasa wants you to know it has tightened up the rules for South Africa’s pivotal municipal elections, set for 4 November 2026. The communications regulator recently published the Municipal Party Elections Broadcasts and Political Advertisements Amendment Regulations 2026. Unfortunately, the regulations are irrelevant to the only fight that matters.

That’s because the regulations apply to broadcasting service licensees: the SABC, eMedia, MultiChoice and radio stations. They do not apply to X, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.

South Africa’s Electoral Commission at least sees the problem. Chairman Mosotho Moepya has been warning since February of a “flurry of deepfakes” and a shift from broad national disinformation to ward-specific deceptions. Chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo has said the commission is building internal capacity for social media response.

In Slovakia in September 2023, an audio file emerged two days before the vote in which Michal Šimečka, leader of the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, appeared to discuss rigging the election with a journalist. It was a deepfake. It dropped during Slovakia’s 48-hour pre-election moratorium, when neither the parties nor the mainstream media could respond properly. By the time fact-checkers had picked it apart, Šimečka had lost to Robert Fico’s pro-Russian Smer. The information environment was already degraded by years of Kremlin-aligned disinformation, but the timing was the weapon.

AI-styled iconography

Romania went further. In November 2024, a previously obscure pro-Russian candidate called Călin Georgescu surged from 5% in the polls to 23% on first-round voting day, propelled almost entirely by an unexplained avalanche of TikTok content. The country’s constitutional court annulled the result on 6 December – the first time an EU member had thrown out a national election over social media manipulation.

For the clearest current demonstration of how political content moves on a modern platform, look at this year’s US-Israel-Iran war. A small Iranian outfit called Explosive Media has been producing AI-generated Lego-style animations targeting US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The animations mock the two leaders, hammering Trump on his appearances in the Epstein files and on the “Taco” tag – Trump always chickens out. They have racked up millions of views on X, TikTok and Instagram.

YouTube banned them in mid-April; other platforms did not. Marc Owen Jones, who studies media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, called this “troll propaganda” and noted that in a contest where Iran cannot win militarily, winning the meme war is the strategy.

The Lego videos are not deepfakes. They are AI-styled iconography produced for a generation that consumes politics as content.

South Africa is not immune to political interference on social media — though our examples are not nearly as amusing as the Iranian Lego memes. From January 2016, the British PR firm Bell Pottinger, hired by the Guptas, ran a multi-year campaign on Twitter pushing “white monopoly capital” as a counter-narrative to state capture reporting.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented dozens of bot accounts amplifying the message. Journalists who challenged the line – Ferial Haffajee, Adriaan Basson, Peter Bruce – were targeted in coordinated attacks.

An AI-era curtain-raiser ran in March 2024 when former President Jacob Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, posted a synthesised clip of Donald Trump’s voice – badly done, plainly fake – endorsing the MK Party. It was shared widely.

Read: SABC says it can’t afford to cover the next election

Deepfakes designed to deceive do mostly fail. But AI content designed to harden the tribe you already belong to has been shown to succeed. South African politics in 2026 is more fragmented and more identity-driven than it has ever been, service delivery has collapsed in most metros, and trust in institutions is at a generational low. That is a market ripe for partisan iconography.

None of this is to say the platforms are only weapons. Helen Zille’s run for Johannesburg mayor – much of it conducted on TikTok and Reels – has the 75-year-old wading through flooded streets in a wetsuit, snorkelling in potholes and directing traffic at intersections with broken lights. The dysfunction she is documenting is real. The reach is far beyond anything a party election broadcast could deliver. That is the upside case for political TikTok. It can be used to good effect, provided it’s not peddling falsehoods.

https://www.tiktok.com/@helenzille/video/7623029156204317972?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7615671890867291655

Icasa governs broadcasters who are mostly not the problem. By November, any party operative in South Africa who wants to fake an opponent’s voice will be able to do it for the price of a burger at Spur. Icasa’s election rulebook will not be relevant to them. The real fight is on the other side of the fence. The focus needs to shift.

A 2024 cooperation agreement with Meta, TikTok and Google was a useful start, but X, under Elon Musk, sat that one out. Without enforceable disclosure rules for synthetic political content and a working agreement with X, the IEC will be debunking yesterday’s fake while tomorrow’s is already trending. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media