Mary Mundeya
When Zimbabwe’s intersex community filed a landmark lawsuit against the government in September 2025, demanding legal recognition, Ronald, an LGBTQI+ rights activist in Harare, knew what would follow. They didn’t anticipate just a sober legal debate, but rather braced for a digital storm. Within hours, their social media feeds were flooded, not with discussion, but with a synchronized wave of fury. The same inflammatory video clips, the same distorted headlines, the same dehumanizing comments, all falsely framing the lawsuit as a covert attempt to “legalize homosexuality.”
“It’s like clockwork,” Ronald says, the exhaustion clear in their voice. “A community stands up for its rights, and a signal goes off. But it’s not a signal for debate. It’s a business opportunity.”
That opportunity is called rage-bait. And a single Facebook post from one of Zimbabwe’s largest pages, ZimCelebs, published on the 30th of September, 2025, shows exactly how the business works.
Their headline read: “Inter-bota activists in Zimbabwe take government to court for legal recognition and protection, hanzi magender ataka pihwa pabirth haasiriwo”.
The word “bota” is not neutral. It is derogatory slang in Zimbabwean online culture, heavily associated with sexual scandal and humiliation. By inserting it, ZimCelebs wasn’t reporting the news; it was framing the intersex community as objects of scandal and ridicule, priming its audience to sneer before they even clicked.
The effect was immediate. The ZimCelebs post exploded, drawing around 1,600 comments, a torrent of laugh emojis, jeers, and sexualized mockery. Engagement was high, but understanding was zero.
Amanda Jones Matirekwe set the tone: “Not in my Zimbabwe (in Bob’s voice),” directly invoking the late President Robert Mugabe’s infamous homophobia. The sentiment was echoed in dismissive conspiracy, with Fanuel Dz commenting, “Looking for western donor funds this one,” reframing a fight for legal recognition as an opportunity to cash out.
The comments quickly escalated to dehumanization and calls for violence. Aldrin Chin labelled the community “Demonic spirits at work,” while Nyasha Mnyamana wrote, “Army kombai tirove” (Army, let’s go and beat them).
Amidst the outrage, some revealed the confusion engineered by the “bota” framing. Maureen Tanyaradzwa Rukwava noted: “Saying INTER BOTA has confused people… The moment you say bota, people rush to think of the actual activity itself, not sexual orientation.”
Yet this confusion was the point. It reduced a complex human rights issue to a crude sexual joke, as seen in Zaanele Moyo’s comment: “Lol this is how they’re dressing it up now.”
Even attempts to sound philosophical, like Ryan Kasiya’s, “We are now giving up our cultural values for what has become socially acceptable”, were rooted in the false premise that the lawsuit sought to erase culture, not secure identity documents. The post had successfully primed its audience not for debate, but for derision.
This stands in stark contrast to the responses garnered by a straightforward news report on the same lawsuit from The Herald. Its factual headline, ‘Intersex community files court petition seeking recognition, protection,’ and its focus on the legal arguments fostered a different kind of discourse. While drawing fewer comments (149), the section became a space for dialogue and education. Readers who had engaged with the article corrected misconceptions, explaining to others that intersex is a biological variation and the lawsuit was about legal documentation. The ethical framing contained the toxicity and fostered informed debate.
Instead of mockery, readers grappled with the new information. Kumbirai Karombe exemplified the initial learning curve, writing: “I didn’t know we had such a problem in our country.”
This opened the door for others to explain. Francin Zvinonetsa Rangarirai directly challenged the demonization seen elsewhere: “People should first understand what ‘intersex’ means before demonising innocent people…” and went on to clarify the biological reality: “We know that kuzvarwa uri intersex is nobody’s choice it just happens.”
The tone shifted from ridicule to cautious support for the legal principle. Colette Rose Whitfield commented: “This is more advanced than anywhere in the world! I am impressed – I hope we are able to have this go through. People shouldn’t have to choose male or female if they are born intersex!”
Here, the ethical framing of the news story contained the toxicity. The conversation was rooted in the facts presented, fostering a nascent but informed debate about legal identity, biology, and human rights, a debate that was relatively absent in the rage-bait reaction.
The same story, two different outcomes. For ZimCelebs, the dehumanizing comments were a metric of success. For the intersex individuals at the centre of the lawsuit, the rage-bait post was a moment where their fight for dignity was reduced to digital entertainment.
This is the investigation into how hate became a business model, and the human cost paid in the currency of clicks.
To understand this economy is to recognize its triggers and its architects. The coordinated digital storm that follows any mention of LGBTQI+ rights in Zimbabwe is not often a random outbreak of outrage but the product of a ruthless, efficient ecosystem. Its business model relies on two primary methods: the deliberate distortion of factual events and the proactive manufacturing of sensationalist content to dominate the news cycle.
The case of ZimCelebs and the intersex lawsuit is a textbook example of the first method. But the blueprint for this exploitation was set two months earlier, in July 2025. That month, two significant, legitimate initiatives were immediately fed into the rage-bait machine. The first was the launch of eMonitor Zimbabwe, a platform created by UNDP Zimbabwe and GALZ (an association of LGBTI people in the country) for the urgent purpose of tracking and analyzing the very hate speech that fuels this economy. The second was the Ministry of Justice’s announcement of a formal legal reform process “aimed at recognising and protecting the rights of intersex persons.” These were facts. But in this economy, facts are merely raw material to be distorted into a single, toxic product: the false narrative of a covert “foreign agenda.”
While this method twists real events, a second, equally pervasive tactic ensures a constant stream of content: the manufacturing of outrage from whole cloth. This strategy is the speciality of popular blogger DJ Sparks, for whom LGBTQI+ targeting has become a core component of his brand. A review of his content reveals a consistent pattern of manipulating conversations to generate outrage, regardless of the interviewee or the intended topic.
In June, DJ Sparks hosted a musician, ostensibly for an interview about his art. Yet, the conversation was strategically steered away from music, instead focusing on an unsubstantiated and graphic story alleging the artist had been sexually assaulted by a gay man. The artist’s creative work became a mere footnote to a sensationalized, trauma-fueled narrative designed to provoke anger and disgust.
This was not an isolated incident. Two months prior, in April, DJ Sparks interviewed actor MC Scala. While the premise was Scala’s journey in film, the published conversation and its headline were transformed into a story about the actor “exposing” gay men in Zimbabwe’s arts sector. Once again, the actual subject was discarded in favor of a narrative that framed the LGBTQI+ community as a hidden menace.
Even when an interview contains no natural link to the topic, one is forcibly inserted. In a conversation with music producer Nhubu Digital, the episode’s headline was engineered to include the defensive declaration: “Nhubu is Not Gay.” The statement, entirely unprompted, served a singular purpose: to associate the guest with the stigma of homosexuality, creating clickbait from a non-issue.
These creators do not operate in isolation. They frequently cross-promote each other’s content, share similar pages in their ‘following’ lists, and actively engage in one another’s comment sections. This creates a feedback loop that consolidates their audience and ensures a toxic narrative, once launched, is amplified rapidly across multiple platforms, making it appear as a mainstream concern.
This playbook creates a template that is replicated and radicalized across the digital landscape. In the wake of content from influencers like DJ Sparks, the rhetoric filters down, normalizing the weaponization of LGBTQI+ identity.
The ecosystem escalates into the active production of fictionalized hate. A Facebook page called 9ine Treyz republished a skit that constructed a narrative of the LGBTQI+ community as an organized, proliferating threat that “needs to be dealt with”, a classic genocidal trope repackaged as comedy. The post amassed 17,000 likes and 791 overwhelmingly derogatory comments, a market signal that dehumanization pays.
The reaction in the comments revealed how this “joke” was received as a literal call to arms. Cousin Macleane wrote: “Turi kuwanda tuwana mainini mukoma…. bamunini babe” (Gays are multiplying, we now have aunts, uncles… fathers), framing the community’s existence as an invasive, familial takeover.
Elmore Korito added: “baba, tirikushota baba” (father, we are short [of numbers], father), a sarcastic plea for more heterosexual people, implying a perceived demographic threat.
The rhetoric swiftly turned violent and dehumanizing. Make it Viral commented: “Nemanakire anoita gambi umwe munhu ane 5 sense anonyika kumadhodhi” (Someone with just 5 senses [a basic human] who has sex with another man should be buried in the sewers).
This was paired with expressions of visceral hatred, as from Tinashe Sunshine Noko: “Kkkkkk haaa to be honest ini I hate ngito will evry fibre in me nxaaaa” (Haaa, to be honest, I hate gays with every fibre in me).
The post’s virality was not in spite of this venom, but because of it. Each comment served as a brick in a wall of hatred, proving the skit’s effectiveness as a rage-bait product designed to trigger and monetize extreme prejudice.
The fabrication grows even more brazen. Pages like Patricia Jack have moved beyond staged skits to creating fabricated evidence, republishing altered videos from the internet and falsely claiming they depict “gay men from Mutare.” The specific claim that the town now has “only a few heterosexual men left” is a dangerous piece of demographic disinformation, framing the community as an existential replacement threat.
The relentless churn of this content is a rational, if cynical, response to the precarious economics of Zimbabwe’s digital creator economy. For a growing number of Zimbabweans, social media has shifted from a pastime to a potential source of income, but the path to monetization is fraught with structural barriers.
Global platforms have strict thresholds for ad-revenue sharing, and even when met, local monetization programs are often unavailable. This forces creators to rely on complex workarounds, making the sheer volume of engagement, likes, shares, and comments the primary currency. This engagement is the key that unlocks revenue streams like sponsorships and affiliate marketing. The most reliable way to generate it? Sensationalism, emotionally charged narratives, and provocative posts.
In this fragile financial landscape, outrage becomes a product. For creators willing to capitalize on social tensions and stigmatized identities, hate and derision are a calculated revenue stream. The public fury surrounding the LGBTQI+ community is a low-cost, high-yield raw material that reliably produces the explosive traffic the system rewards.
The human cost of this industrial-scale othering is a frayed social fabric. For activists like Ronald, this constant churn is a source of profound exhaustion; it transforms public discourse into a hostile environment where their humanity is perpetually debated as a ploy for profit. For the silent majority of viewers, it creates a distorted reality, one where members of the LGBTQI+ community are presented not as fellow citizens but as a pervasive threat, a political tool, or the punchline of a cruel joke.
This is the true currency of the rage-bait economy: it pays creators in clicks, and funds itself by spending the dignity and safety of a vulnerable community. In this sphere, the business model is hate.
This article was produced with mentorship from the African Academy for Open Source Investigations (AAOSI) as part of an initiative by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway and Code for Africa (CfA). Visit https://disinfo.africa for more information.
