Matshepo Seedat explores how we distinguish real crises from manufactured ones in the age of AI
I have been spokesperson to the Minister of Higher Education and Training for a year and communicating in the Post-School Education and Training sector, it often feels as though we operate in a perpetual state of crisis.
In reflecting on the year, I have come to believe that there is an important distinction between a real crisis and a manufactured crisis. A real crisis is grounded in demonstrable facts and tangible consequences for people’s lives. It demands urgent intervention, policy responses, leadership, and, where appropriate, public accountability. A manufactured crisis on the other hand, emerges when speculation, unverified claims or sensational narratives are elevated above evidence. It becomes a crisis not necessarily because the facts warrant it, but because repetition, virality, and the social media following of the person making the claim give it the appearance of truth. This distinction matters far beyond the communications profession. It is fundamentally a leadership challenge.
Leaders today are increasingly required to distinguish between what is genuinely urgent and what merely appears urgent. The greatest strategic risk is allowing manufactured crises to consume leadership attention, institutional capacity, and public trust while systemic problems facing organisations requiring leadership remain unresolved.
This distinction has become increasingly blurred in today’s digital media ecosystem where speed is outlasts verification. Engagement can outweigh accuracy. A claim can reach millions of people before anyone has established whether it is true or not. Public opinion can therefore be shaped before facts are established, placing leaders and communicators in the difficult position of responding to narratives that may have little or no factual foundation.
For a government communicator, the consequences are colossal. Having the responsibility to provide services to the South African public with diminishing resources and urgent citizen needs, communications capacity, and institutional credibility are all limited.
Every hour spent responding to an unfounded allegation is an hour that cannot be spent addressing a genuine institutional challenge. This makes attention itself a strategic resource. In the age of AI, whoever captures attention can influence the public conversation. Algorithms are designed to reward engagement, and emotionally charged content frequently generates more engagement than careful explanation. The result is an information environment in which the most important issue is not always the issue receiving the most attention. For leaders, this creates a new imperative: learn to distinguish signal from noise.
Consider a deliberately absurd example:
Imagine someone posts on social media that pigs can fly. The post gains traction because the individual making the claim has a large social media following. Soon afterwards, a journalist contacts a government spokesperson asking whether pigs fly, where they fly to, and who authorised them to have wings. The spokesperson, understandably puzzled, responds that pigs do not fly, have never flown and therefore could not possibly have flown anywhere because they do not have wings. The following day, the headline reads: “Government denies giving pigs wings”.
The body of the article spends almost its entire length discussing where the pigs allegedly flew, quoting people who claim they saw them being winged, while the factual denial occupies a single sentence near the end of the article. Readers then flood social media expressing outrage that government is “covering up” the scandal, despite never having seen a flying pig themselves and despite no evidence ever having been presented.
Absurd as this example may sound, it resembles the way many contemporary media narratives develop, at least in my experience. The allegation becomes the story. The denial becomes proof that there must be something to deny and verification becomes secondary to visibility. The story acquires a life of its own with no verifiable facts. This is the anatomy of a manufactured crisis.
With the fast evolution of AI, a fabricated claim can be accompanied by a convincing image. A false statement can be presented in a realistic voice. A fictitious event can be given the appearance of having been witnessed by thousands of people.
We need to start asking, “What exactly are we responding to?” Not every controversy is a crisis. There is an important caveat to consider. Manufactured crises are not to be confused with legitimate investigative journalism, robust public criticism or democratic accountability–these are necessary in a democracy. Government, corporations, universities, and other public institutions must be subjected to scrutiny. Whistleblowers must be heard. Journalists must hold us to account. Citizens have every right to demand answers from those entrusted with billions of taxpayers money. The concern arises when allegations are treated as established facts before evidence is tested, when speculation is presented as certainty, or when virality becomes a substitute for verification. There is a profound difference between asking difficult questions and constructing a predetermined narrative around an untested allegation. Good leadership must be able to tolerate scrutiny without becoming captive to every controversy, while, the real crises remain.
Within the PSET sector for example, South Africa faces an unsustainable student funding model. This has profound implications for access to higher education, institutional sustainability, the quality of education, and the future prospects of deserving students, that is a real crisis that deserves accurate reporting, informed public debate, and constructive engagement from all of society. Yet too often, attention is diverted towards controversies that generate clicks but contribute little towards solving the country’s most pressing challenges. This, by the way, is not unique to education. South Africa continues to confront unemployment, inequality, infrastructure constraints, poor service delivery, institutional governance challenges, and the consequences of a rapidly changing global economy. These challenges rarely fit neatly into a viral post–even from those who claim to hold government accountable.
They require evidence, patience, expertise, difficult choices, and sustained leadership. The attention economy, however, rewards the opposite.
The newsroom must also confront digital disruption. Much has been said about how social media has disrupted government communication. These are necessary conversations. But it would be equally valuable to talk about how the newsroom itself has responded to digital disruption.
Has journalism maintained the same standards of verification in an era where every social media post can become tomorrow’s headline? Has the pressure to publish quickly, weakened the principles contained within the Press Code? Has the constitutional protection of media freedom been matched by an equally strong commitment to accuracy, fairness and context?
These are not attacks on the media. They are questions about the health of our democracy. Media freedom is indispensable to democratic society, but the credibility of journalism ultimately rests on the obligation for accuracy. In an environment where a correction rarely travels as far as the original falsehood, accuracy is not simply an ethical principle. It is a public responsibility. When the burden of proof is reversed
The common-law principle captured in the Latin maxim ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat reminds us that the burden of proof rests upon the person who alleges, not upon the person who denies. Yet contemporary public discourse can sometimes invert this principle. An allegation receives extensive coverage, while the response from the person or institution accused is reduced to a sentence stating that they “deny the allegations”. The result is predictable. Readers may remember the allegation long after they have forgotten the denial. This is particularly problematic in the age of social media, where repetition creates familiarity and familiarity can be mistaken for truth. The danger is that perception becomes evidence and once perception hardens into “fact”, even a subsequent correction may struggle to dislodge it.
This has serious consequences for leadership. A leader can make the correct decision based on evidence and still lose public confidence if the information environment has convinced citizens that the evidence says otherwise. That is why trust has become a form of institutional capital because where there is trust, even misinformation is treated with suspicion by the public.
Matshepo Seedat is the Spokesperson for the Minister of Higher Education and Training.