Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates political content creation by popular male podcasters in the run-up to the South African national elections in 2024. It aims to contribute to the nascent debate on "populist influencers" and social media’s complex role in shaping politics in Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst the South African political podcaster landscape is diverse, it is conspicuously male dominated. The so-called "pod-bros”, which often have tens of thousands of followers, range from alt-right, libertarian whites that push the “CapeXit” narrative to black conservatives that demonize critical race theory and self-styled “self-made”-men that give business advice to a primarily young, urban and male audience. A common denominator is an anti-mainstream-media narrative and little regard for fact-checking. However, their platforms also differ significantly, e.g. in the degree of sophistication of production, topic range as well as sources of finance.

In this article, I empirically investigate this hitherto understudied group of political content creators, starting with a mapping of their various entanglements, topics discussed as well as their financial and political affiliations. I then take a deep-dive into selected podcast episodes of four of these pod-bros leading up to the South African national elections by making use of qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis.

This article aims to contribute to the nascent debate on populist influencers and social media’s complex role in shaping politics in Africa, in particular in South Africa where 22 of its approximately 60 million inhabitants are social media users. Whilst investigations into the link between social media and populism have slowly increased for South Africa (see e.g. Beresford et al., 2023) and isolated academic analyses of (brand) influencers exist (Iqani, 2019), the triangular connection between these topics has not yet been empirically or theoretically investigated.