[imagesource: The South African]

Social media is pretty much a cesspit at the best of times.

Twitter, where accounts are often faceless and nameless (oh look, here’s @ben238918282 with a hot take), is perhaps the worst of the lot.

It was here that much of the untruths around the recent looting and violence circulated (#PhoenixMassacre, for example), and that’s just the latest example of unrest being sown for political gain.

In the case of ‘Tracy Zille’, a Twitter account that shot to prominence last year and quickly racked up more than 30 000 followers, it didn’t take too long before the wheels came off.

(Should have gone with Karen Zille, to tick all of the boxes.)

Now the Equality Court in Louis Trichardt, Limpopo, is hearing the case against EFF councillor Anthony Matumba, who is alleged to be the man behind the account, which “spread disparaging, racist and harassing comments towards black women”.

TimesLIVE reports:

The account caused a storm after it posted tweets about the difference between white and black cultures. Other tweets pretended to offer “advice” from white people to other races.

“From a closer inspection, and after an expose in the media, it was reported the Tracy Zille account was, in fact, run by Anthony Matumba [above], a councillor from the Makhado municipality,” the [SA Human Rights Commission] said.

An adult man, with a job as an EFF councillor, allegedly tweeting as a white woman in order to sow discord and direct traffic to websites which he owned – how embarrassing.

If you really want to dig deep into the investigation that unmasked Matumba, you can read the full Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) report.

An example of some of the race-baiting tweets from the now-defunct account:

The account also posted fake news stories with links to websites run by Matumba:

During this week’s court action, the SAHRC hopes to have Mutamba’s comments classified as “harassment based on gender and race”, and force him to pay damages.

Mutamba has denied the allegations, but the proof appears overwhelming.

Some of the basics of the DFRLabs investigation via Review Online:

[DFR Labs researcher Jean] Le Roux said when conducting disinformation research, identifying who benefits from the activity is the strongest indicator of who is running the account. In this case, the @TracyZille account was part of a network that only shared links to websites Matumba would make money off.

“This was not a once-off thing either; of the 102 tweets the DFRLab investigation considered, 61 contained links to one of three websites that belong to Matumba. In addition, the @TracyZille account in some instances shared links to articles published by Matumba mere minutes earlier, while in other cases it shared links from Matumba’s website that was more than a month old. This is abnormal behaviour intended to drive traffic to the site, and the traffic generated in this way stands to benefit only one individual: Matumba, the owner of the website,” Le Roux added.

When all the evidence points in one direction, that’s usually a good place to start.

With the original account shut down, it appears that Tracy Zille may have been reborn:

Tell the world that Tracy Zille is back as @MadamZille

I am here to stay.

— Tracy Zille (@MadamZille) March 30, 2021

Karen Zille, man.

It was right there.

[sources:timeslive&reviewonline]