ANALYSIS
South Africans, furious at the role British PR firm Bell Pottinger played in stoking racial divisions to support the president and Gupta family, helped bring about their demise in the country through a social media backlash.
That is the finding of data analyst Kyle F, of superlinear.co.za, who said a deluge of opposition on twitter, forced Bell Pottinger to apologise for its activities in the country. It has emerged these included promoting ideas of white capital and running smear campaigns individual members of the media to divert attention from alleged corruption and state capture.
"I've been collecting tweets that mention Bell Pottinger or the Gupta-owned Oakbay account lead, Victoria Geoghegan, for about three weeks now [June 13 to July 5]", he said. "In that time, I collected more than 34,000 tweets. The irony of a PR agency being at the centre of such a massive PR storm is lost on few, I think."
He continued: "South Africans are seething with anger at British PR firm Bell Pottinger for the part that the firm played in creating a racially divisive narrative on behalf of our president and the Gupta family, with whom the president allegedly has a corrupt relationship."
Below is a graph showing the daily volumes collected by Kyle F. "Thousands of tweets have been generated in the past few weeks, which is likely what motivated the company to apologise. This wasn't just going to go away", he said.
Daily tweet volumes mentioning Bell Pottinger or Victoria Geoghegan between June 13 and July 5 2017.
The diversity of the communities reacting on twitter shows the extent of fury about the company's activities in South Africa, he said.
"The kind of sentiment and comments coming out of most communities is overwhelmingly negative with the exception of the usual Radical Economic Transformers [RET] community, which introduced the topic of white monopoly capital to our discourse in the first place, so no surprises there", he said.
Interaction network showing the communities discussing Bell Pottinger. Users are connected together when they retweet or @mention each other and the Louvain Modularity algorithm is used to identify communities in different colours.
He looked at the top 10 most popular ones overall, which are generally scathing of Bell Pottinger's actions and involvement:
In stark contrast to all other communities stands the radical economic transformerscommunity. The top most-engaged-with tweet (although this was likely boosted by fake accounts) was a tweet from the @wmc_leaks account (which has now been suspended):
@wmc_leaks: "No links with Guptas or Bell Pottinger, we only favour truth and Black Empowerment unlike #wmcpaidmedia.... https://t.co/7aDI5ol9Ym" (original URL).
Here are the remaining top tweets in this community, which Kyle F said was a "beguiling mix of legitimate food for thought, biased partisanship and outright racism".
"One narrative is driven by a specific group while the other represents broad-based sentiment across various groups in our society. Now that Bell Pottinger has apologised, it will be very interesting to see how South Africans react," he added.
Read Kyle F's full post here.