Dr Mashilo Boloka, the FIRED former censorship chief, now leads a company that could DECIDE what you see online. (Photograph by Lesley Moyo)
FIRED from his role as South Africa’s top content cop, Dr Mashilo Boloka is BACK with a dangerous new power grab. His startup, the ominously named Online Safety Lab (OS Lab), isn’t just offering advice—it’s positioning itself as the continent’s PRIVATE THOUGHT POLICE, ready to clean up the internet for corporations and governments alike. This is the SAME man who left the Film and Publication Board under a cloud of allegations, now selling his insider knowledge to the highest bidders in the “Trust and Safety” industry.
This isn’t about safety; it’s about CONTROL. Boloka’s venture exploits the very panic about “digital threats” he helped cultivate. His lab promises to wield AI-driven content moderation and “risk assessments” to scrub platforms clean, targeting everything from alleged fraud to so-called harmful speech. This creates a chilling precedent: a single, unaccountable entity, run by a former regulator, holding the keys to online discourse across Africa.
Even more SHOCKING is his admitted use of AI for “content creation” and moderation. This is a man who warns of AI deepfakes and voice cloning—particularly targeting women—while building a business that DEPENDS on the same flawed, black-box algorithms to police speech. It’s the ultimate hypocrisy: manufacturing the problem to sell the cure. The “human oversight” he touts is a mere fig leaf for a system built to scale censorship.
Who decides what constitutes an “unsafe digital environment”? Who defines “harmful content”? The answers will now be crafted in Boloka’s lab, funded by platforms and policymakers seeking to avoid scandal. This marks the terrifying privatization of digital rights, where free speech is outsourced to a for-profit startup run by a controversial former bureaucrat. The gatekeepers of your reality are no longer just in Silicon Valley or the state—they’re operating from a shadowy lab, and they have a score to settle. Your digital future is being moderated by the very ghosts of regulatory past.
Author: Kayitsi.com
