Fake Narratives, Dominant Discourses: The Role and Influence of Algorithms on the Online South African Land Reform Debate

Within this paper the authors explore the discourse surrounding algorithmic processes, by examining the way a search engine's result influenced an online debate about land reform in South Africa. The article begins by reflecting on the rise of the internet contributing to issues around fake news. Then it continues to discuss the incident that serves as case study for this paper. In June 2018 Twitter users criticised the search engine Google for only displaying photos of white people when one type the words "squatter camps in South Africa" into the Google Image search bar. In the debate that followed, many of the online users accused Google of propagating a biased narrative to destabilise land reform. The paper's purpose is to explain the role of algorithms to readers from the fields of humanities and social sciences without a technical background in computer science. Through exploring the "squatter camps in South Africa" -case study, the authors intend to reveal to the reader the power online search engines have in shaping the public debate. Yet, through conducting their own search on different international search engines, but using the same key words, they prove that it is not in fact the algorithms that are biased, but rather the online data that is generated by internet users themselves.