Social media noise does not necessarily correlate to votes. “If you look at the ZACP and the Black First Land First (BLF), they certainly have a profile on social media that is fundamentally disproportionate to their relevance and the number of votes they got,” William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), told Daily Maverick. “You can put out a lot of things on social media, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect what happens in the polls.”