Remember those Verimark infomercials — slick demos, glowing “customers,” and countdown clocks urging you to buy? They embodied a compact persuasion playbook built on urgency and social proof. In South Africa’s 2024 election, the same levers resurfaced; not via TV, but through social media narratives. In this talk, we unpack how political parties can be flipped overnight, how paid influence-for-hire markets steer online debate, and how foreign influence operations from Russia and the U.S. are reshaping public reality. Drawing on Murmur’s public work, I’ll surface what we’ve uncovered, what still lies redacted, and map out ethics-aware paths for attribution research.