12 September 2022, Bongani Mdakane, Sunday World
Media Monitoring Africa director William Bird said: “I suspect that the SAPS do not have means and expertise to do the job on their own, and if we look at the case of the failure to act on the cases of the July unrest last year you will see that they didn’t have the means to trace people.
“This is a legacy of the government’s failure in terms of investment in those perimeters.
“On that July unrest cases, police had to follow strict protocols to track down those responsible for fuelling unrests and Twitter helped a lot. All the information that the police got came through the right channels.”
“Even though service providers can be given the tender, it won’t be easy for them to get everything right without going through right channels,” Bird said.
“The SAPS needs a dedicated unit to deal with such investigations (into social media investigations) and also needs the support of fully equipped software companies to get the job done,” he said.