Abstract
Political advertisements have now become common in South Africa. This chapter discusses the political campaign advertisement officially perceived to be negative and banned. During South Africa’s fifth national elections in 2014, the political advertisement titled ‘i-ANC Ayisafani’ (the ANC is no longer the same) was perceived as negative and consequently banned by the South African Public Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). The advert portrays the then Democratic Alliance’s (DA) spokesperson and now leader (Mmusi Maimane) making serious corruption and maladministration claims against the governing ANC. Using the reception theory, this chapter specifically focuses on the reception of the advert on the YouTube page on which it has been widely made available. The findings from our analysis illustrates that social media plays an important role as an ‘uncensored virtual’ public sphere. On the positive, the advertisement elicited rigorous debates about the state of governance and political party loyalty in South Africa and resulted in a Streisand effect. On the negative, it confirms that negative political advertising sometimes works against the sponsoring candidates by engendering support for a target candidate.
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- 1.
Then SABC spokesperson, Kaizer Kganyago, in an interview with the SABC Digital News mentioned that statements such as ‘police are killing our people’ incites violence against the police and that the advert makes personal attacks against certain individuals which is not permissible in the Broadcasting Act. The interview is accessible [30/07/2019] from http://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/sabc-speaks-out-on-da-advert/.
- 2.
The rationale for not attaching names and other demographic information with the comments has already been made in the section outlining the limitations of this study. What we would like to emphasize therefore is that the matter of keeping the comments nameless is rational and should be understood within the context of the study being exploratory and thus focusing on the ‘what’ question instead of the ‘who’ question. However, the demographical details can be easily tracked in the YouTube advertisement (Democratic Alliance, 2014, April 8) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6jU2bZxGKI [Retrieved: 27/04/2019].
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Tyali, S.M., Mukhudwana, R.F. (2020). Discourses on Political Advertising in South Africa: A Social Media Reception Analysis. In: Ndlela, M., Mano, W. (eds) Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32682-1_13
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