🇳🇬 English, 21 October 2026, election-disinformation
South Africa Recruits Big Tech to Fight AI Election Deepfakes
The Electoral Commission partners with Google, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok to combat AI-generated disinformation before the November local government elections.
The partnership builds on the framework used for the 2024 national and provincial elections, where platforms keep applying their own policies, including advisory labels, content removals, and account suspensions.
Google is developing SynthID, a tool to help users tell authentic content from AI-generated material, while Microsoft will help voters find authoritative information and counter deceptive AI-generated content.
The Electoral Code of Conduct Countering Disinformation requires AI-generated or synthetic audio, images, video, and text to be labelled before distribution, and parties to report suspected online disinformation within 36 hours of becoming aware of it.