It is illegal to create mendacious articles in order to discredit people based on competition and hate.
The trucking industry has had several challenges over the few years, relating to cheaper labour and retaliation against South African truckers in other countries due to the recent Xenophobic incidence.
These have caused many local truckers to engage in boycotting acts, sabotage and more recently a domain called satrucker.co.za that takes images from SApolice website and uses some of these images to fabricate articles that promotes anti-migrant narratives.
Several reports and a more recent tweet under #putsouthafricanfirst has shown the clear reason why a site that publishes unverifiable news must be taken down. A team has then been assigned to contact ZACR to submit a takedown notice.
There was no contact or information regarding the creators of satrucker website and a submission platform for complaints or inquiries, so we could not communicate with the platform operators.
Our response to the stories on social platforms:
satrucker is an anti-migrant and mendacious platform created to discredit migrants working in trucking. It is the wrong way to move forward. A claim was placed with ZACR for domain takedown #putsouthafricansfirst #changetogether #movetogether #migrantsarehumans #migrantsmovement pic.twitter.com/GaSdhMvcQ5
— migrantsmovement (@migrantsmoveme1) July 21, 2020
Individuals can also do the same for any other sites with untrue or malicious articles by downloading and filling the attached form.
