Election Center: 2024 South African general election
Important reminders to consider for before, during and after the 2024 South African general election.
After Election Day
Now that the votes have been cast, there are a couple of steps you can take to either maintain your public presence or properly close down your campaign online.
If you want to maintain a public presence, follow these tips for updating your campaign Page:
- Review your Page admins: ensure that you remove Page admins who do not need to be on your Page or Business Manager in order to keep your assets safe. We recommend you pick at least two Page admins to remain on the Page, ideally yourself and/or staff who will continue to work with you.
- Preserve access to your Business Suite and Ads Account for accessibility and future learnings.
- Consider Page changes:
- Change your Page category from Politician to whichever Page category best suits you and your Page. For example, if you were elected, select Community or Public Figure and then select the Government Official.
- Adjust your profile photo and cover photo to better reflect the new purpose of the Page.
- Set expectations in your ‘About’ section about the future activity level of the Page, either as an unmonitored archive or a Page about your new role after the campaign.
- Download a copy of your Page: this doesn’t affect the Page itself. It just provides you and your team with a static archive of your posts, videos, insights and more.
If you don’t want to maintain a public presence:
- Download a copy of your Page: this doesn’t affect the Page itself. It just provides you and your team with a static archive of your posts, videos, insights and more.
- Unpublish or delete your Page: you can unpublish the Page, which removes it from public view but leaves it available for an admin to re-publish it someday. You can also delete the Page, which removes the Page and all of its content permanently. Note: we don’t normally recommend this because once the Page is gone, this process cannot be reversed.
If you start a new office:
The new Pages experience is a way for you to manage your professional presence on Facebook. It can help you build your brand or business, grow your audience and connect with followers.
If you need help with your Page, reach out to our team.
Verifications requests
The verified badge means an account has been verified based on their activity across our products and information or documents they provide.
A Facebook Page or profile with a verified badge next to it now indicates that Facebook has confirmed that it is the authentic presence for that person or brand. Previously, the verified badge also required the person or brand to be notable and unique. You may still see users with a verified badge that represents our previous eligibility requirements.
WhatsApp is a fast, simple and secure messaging service. As a private messaging service dedicated to helping people speak freely, we recognize that democratic institutions protect this right.
→ Learn more
Getting assistance/support from our dedicated Meta support team
The Meta Support Pro team provides a consistent and seamless partner experience by answering product questions, resolving operational and technical issues for all government, politics and non-profit partners.
Transparency for ads about social issues, elections or politics
We are committed to securing our platforms and providing transparency before, during and post elections. Get authorized to run ads about social issues, elections or politics.
→ Step by Step authorization guide
Launch your campaign
To help protect your information and keep your accounts and the Pages you manage secure, we recommend you follow our security practices outlined in this guide, which include:
- Turning on two-factor authentication
- Taking the security and privacy checkups
- Making sure your information, such as the email address on file, is up to date
During times of elections, having accurate information and a peaceful debate is ever more important. Understanding, detecting and taking appropriate actions against various issues such as misinformation and hate speech therefore becomes a crucial skill set to obtain information online.
While we provide our users many tools and resources for content specific issues, we are aware that we have responsibilities to work with experts, civil society organizations and many others and provide solutions for increasing the digital literacy skills of users. As Meta, we are constantly working with this aim in mind and working towards providing various educational tools, trainings and solutions to make sure everyone has the relevant knowledge to navigate online confidently.
With this in mind, we’ve worked on an on and off-platform campaign focusing on awareness raising and informing people about what misinformation and hate speech are and what users could do if they encounter such speech on the internet. In the upcoming months, we will also provide educational resources, explaining safety tips for how to tackle scamming and hacking.
Safety and security is necessary for individuals in the public eye. That's true whether one may be a political candidate up for election, a creator with a growing fan base, an activist helming online movements or a journalist reporting during a crisis. We take threats to users' safety seriously and have specific guidance for those in politics and other public-facing roles. We encourage public figures to familiarize themselves with platform-specific safety tools and features.
At Meta, we believe that women have the right to be free from violence when participating in politics. These rights are fundamental to strengthening our democracies. We are committed to providing a platform to help women in government safely connect and build their online communities. As part of this effort, we have taken a comprehensive approach that includes engaging with safety experts, developing new safety tools and resources and creating policies that help prevent abuse across our platforms.
Resources
Reach and engage voters organically
Foster community
An organic presence (or unpaid social content) across Meta technologies is important for you to connect with the people you care about.
Performance 5 for candidates running for office
Figuring out how to improve ad performance can feel complicated. But knowing what steps to take to better your ad campaigns just got easier. To make the most of machine learning, we have developed the Performance 5 - a simple, strategic framework to help you increase the effectiveness of your media dollars on our platforms right now.
