Exploring social media counter-narratives of the national prosecuting authority on X regarding the July 2021 South African unrest

Abstract

The July 2021 unrest in South Africa represented a pivotal episode of instability in the country’s democratic dispensation, precipitating a digital contestation as significant as the physical violence it accompanied. Following the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court, X (formerly Twitter) became a central site on which users constructed, circulated, and sought to legitimise alternative narratives about the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). This study positions these narratives as purposive, structurally organised discursive interventions that fundamentally reshaped how institutional legitimacy, prosecutorial authority, and justice were publicly evaluated in South Africa's digitally mediated democratic environment. Guided by counter-narrative theory (CNT), digital public sphere theory (DPST), and participatory theory (PT), the study employs qualitative content analysis within an interpretivist paradigm, drawing on a purposively selected sample of 20 tweets collected between July 2021 and July 2025 to capture both the acute phase of the unrest and its sustained digital aftermath. The sample was retrieved through five hashtags, namely #July2021Unrest, #July2021Riots, #FreeJacobZuma, #PhoenixMassacre, and #ZumaUnrest, with each tweet treated as a multimodal discursive artefact and read closely rather than coded for frequency. The analysis identifies five recurring narrative genres, namely populism, propaganda framing, misinformation and disinformation, ideological framing, and historical memory and emotive symbolism through which counter-narratives about the NPA were constructed. These genres did not function in isolation but converged and reinforced one another within a shared counter-narrative ecosystem that collectively repositioned the NPA from an institution upholding the rule of law to one seen as politically compromised, racially partial, and delegitimised adversary of the people, sustained through six discursive strategies, namely emotive framing, scapegoating, symbolic amplification, participatory engagement, moral dichotomies, and repetition and virality at a level of communicative technique. Thematic analysis further identified four formations within the dataset. Political persecution and victimhood framed Zuma's prosecution as an attack on the liberation struggle. Institutional betrayal and elite corruption portrayed the NPA as serving factional interests rather than constitutional accountability. Racialised violence and communal defence centred on the NPA's perceived failure to prosecute Phoenix-related violence with equal urgency, echoing South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) findings on the absence of NPA instructions and communication breakdowns between police, witnesses, and victims. Hashtag mobilisation and symbolic references formed the connective infrastructure that organised, amplified, and sustained these formations across the digital public sphere. The study proposes a five-genre analytical framework that may be useful for comparable studies of institutional legitimacy contestation in African and postcolonial settings, offering an evidence-based account, within the scope of a small purposive sample, of how digital counter-narrative production draws on historical memory, liberation iconography, and racial grievance in postcolonial democracies. The findings suggest that legal legitimacy in digitally networked societies is shaped not only by constitutional authority and procedural conduct, but also by the emotional, symbolic, and participatory registers through which publics interpret and evaluate institutional justice.