INDUSTRY OPINION
Africa could become a testing ground for tech-enabled social engineering The absence of robust safeguards leaves many countries on the continent vulnerable to data manipulation. By Karen Allen, Institute of Security Studies. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/africa-could-become-a-testing-ground-fortech-enabled-social-engineering
W
ithin a year, much of the world has adopted the norm of wearing masks to protect against the Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the political jostling that such face coverings have come to represent, it has become a social norm driven by circumstance. Scholars have undertaken extensive work1 on the life cycle of norms to demonstrate how they cascade into society and eventually become internalised. But to what extent does technology have a normative function – the power to shape human behaviour and deliver real-world consequences? In the absence of robust safeguards and in states with fragile democracies, could Africa become
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SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA APRIL 2021
a testing ground for tech-enabled social engineering? Shaping norms or beliefs, governing how we vote, who we love and stirring up existing ethnic or religious cleavages? Information disorders expert Eleonore Pauwels argues that the convergence of artificial intelligence and data-capture capability threatens to undermine2 institutions that form the bedrock of democracies. The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence tech tools across Africa, coupled with powerful social media
platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, has made data a commodity. Some commentators describe it as the new oil. These tech tools include biometric databases for tracking population movements at borders, registering voters before elections or documenting key life events (births, marriages and deaths). Besides capturing human behaviour, likes and preferences, technology potentially has the power to shape it, Pauwels argued at a webinar on surveillance3 and information disorder in
Machine learning technologies have the potential to override or shape human judgement and political agency securityfocusafrica.com
