Wherever I speak these days, the same question comes up. It’s never just one person. It’s always several. And it’s always asked quietly, almost apologetically.
How do I know what to believe?
Sometimes the question goes wider. If I don’t know what to believe, do I just stop believing everything? And if that’s the case, is it better to switch it all off?
This is not a theoretical concern. It is a lived one. And in South Africa, it is becoming increasingly common.
We talk a lot about misinformation and disinformation as if they are technical problems. In reality, most people don’t experience them that way. To a tired, anxious citizen scrolling through a phone late at night, the distinction barely matters.
Creating confusion, undermining confidence
Misinformation is the unintentional sharing of information that is wrong. Disinformation is the deliberate creation and circulation of information that is known to be false. One is careless, the other intentional. But emotionally, they land in the same place.
They create confusion. They undermine confidence. They make us doubt our judgement. This isn’t just disorienting – it’s emotionally damaging.
And crucially, information doesn’t arrive in a vacuum.
South Africans are not uniquely gullible. But we are uniquely stretched.
Fear not an abstract
Fear here is not abstract. It is rooted in daily life. Fear about personal safety, jobs, whether the rand will hold, if the government is capable of delivering even the most basic services.
That fear doesn’t switch off. It accumulates.
When fear becomes constant, it turns into anxiety – not panic, but a low-grade, ruminating unease about what comes next. It’s the feeling that something is always about to go wrong, that stability is temporary, that nothing quite holds.
Living in that state is exhausting.
Exhaustion doesn’t always look dramatic. Often it looks like withdrawal. We disengage from political coverage. We stop reading the news. We retreat emotionally and become numb. Not because we don’t care, but because caring has started to feel unbearable.
This is the moment when most of us become most vulnerable – not to anger, but to certainty.
Deeply seductive narratives
When everything feels unstable, simple narratives are deeply seductive. Think of Trump in the United States. How he’s reduced complex economic and social anxieties to a single, emotionally charged story about immigrants – clear villains, simple answers, strong promises of order. Political messages that have flattened complexity into good and bad, blame and certainty.
In South Africa, this vulnerability is intensified by context.
We don’t have the same kind of polarisation as the United States, where politics is divided into two entrenched ideological camps locked in perpetual conflict. Our divisions are messier and harder to pin down. They are driven less by ideology than by frustration, disillusionment and unmet expectations.
Official unemployment in South Africa sits in the low 30s. Expanded unemployment, which includes people who have stopped looking for work altogether, is above 40%. Crime remains a constant source of anxiety. Inequality is stark. And trust in government is low.
Immediate consequences
Globally, confidence in institutions has been eroding for years. South Africa is not immune to that trend. But here, the consequences often feel immediate. When we believe the state is failing, we are less inclined to trust official explanations. When we feel institutions don’t work for us, we look elsewhere for meaning and reassurance.
This is when mis- and disinformation do their most effective work.
We don’t need to be convinced of something entirely new. We only need to receive information that amplifies what we already fear. Elections, in particular, are when uncertainty dominates, stakes feel high and emotions run close to the surface.
Anxieties about personal safety and economic survival are already present, and they create fertile ground for narratives about corruption, betrayal and national collapse to take hold.
And because these narratives are emotionally charged, they travel faster than nuance ever could.
When belief collapses
The result is not a population confidently aligned behind opposing truths, but something more fragile. A population that doesn’t know who or what to trust. A population that oscillates between consuming too much information and avoiding it altogether.
That’s why the most worrying trend isn’t simply that people believe the wrong things. It’s that they no longer believe anything reliably at all.
When belief collapses, judgement weakens. When judgement weakens, people are more easily drawn to simplistic solutions and polarising rhetoric – not because we are extreme, but because we are tired.
This matters profoundly in a local government election year.
Local government election stress
Democracy depends on engagement, even uncomfortable engagement. It depends on citizens who are willing to weigh competing claims, tolerate uncertainty, and sit with complexity. When exhaustion replaces engagement, the space for manipulation widens.
None of this means South Africans are incapable of discernment. It means we are human, living under sustained pressure in an information environment designed to exploit exactly that.
The question “How do I know what to believe?” is not a failure of intelligence. It’s a warning sign. It tells us that the information ecosystem is placing demands on many of us that we can no longer meet.
If we ignore that, we risk mistaking withdrawal for apathy, and confusion for indifference. In reality, what we are seeing is a public that is overwhelmed – and therefore increasingly exposed.
And that is when the most dangerous stories take hold: not because they are persuasive, but because they are simple enough to survive exhaustion.
Paula Slier is an international journalist and speaker who works on information warfare, disinformation and media literacy. She has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
