PHD RESEARCH
Yossabel Chetty: Understanding the drivers of information disorder among South African TikTok users to design contextually rich and responsive countermeasures.
Yossabel Chetty’s PhD, which begins in 2026, places the social media consumer at the centre of the media consumption journey in an effort to understand the value that South African TikTok users derive from content that erodes information integrity and stifles democratic progress. Since Hungary’s shift toward authoritarianism in the early 2000s, many countries around the world have been similarly emboldened to adopt a more conservative system of governance, leading to democratic backsliding. This study seeks to combine media and marketing theories, employing an interpretivist approach, to decode the comments on problematic material concerning politics and the state of the nation in South Africa. The study posits that making sense of the value exchange that exists between the capitalist, marketing machine that is social media and the people who are consuming the content is an essential angle for exploration in order to move beyond “debunking” toward designing more effective, context-specific countermeasures to information disorder.
Daniel Roodt: The role of private actors in limiting media freedom in South Africa through strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) and information disorder-driven online campaigns.
Daniel Roodt’s PhD, which begins in 2026, will examine strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPPs) and online information disorder campaigns targeting journalists in South Africa. The project seeks to reframe understandings of media freedom by foregrounding the role of private actors in undermining journalism and investigative reporting. It also aims to analyse how modern communications technology has exacerbated and reshaped the challenges facing journalists, in particular through understanding the role of AI and access to the digital public sphere. As part of the research, Daniel will conduct interviews with leading experts and with journalists who have been directly targeted by SLAPPs and disinformation campaigns.
Ellen Agnew: The functioning of the TikTok algorithm as a possible site and instrument of violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Ellen Agnew works in media and communications within the international development sector, and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Journalism at Stellenbosch University. Her research sits at the intersection of aesthetics, algorithmic intermediation and decoloniality, where she examines the algorithm, specifically as it functions on social media platform TikTok, as a possible site and instrument of violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. What most excites Ellen about the study, however, is her investigation into how, if at all, individuals and communities in South Africa and Kenya are ‘outwitting’ the algorithm – using satire, gossip, humour or aesthetic strategies to mitigate both algorithmic harms and their embodied effects.