Phumzile Thelma Van Damme (born 20 July 1983) is a South African tech consultant and activist who specialises in combating political disinformation and misinformation.

Regarded as a member of a social liberal grouping in the DA, Van Damme was sacked from the shadow cabinet in December 2020 after John Steenhuisen took office as the party's leader.

Since leaving frontline politics, Van Damme has been a freelance consultant on strategy and communications matters relating to disinformation and misinformation, platform accountability and tech regulation, digital rights, and gender-based cyber-harassment.

Van Damme was born on 20 July 1983 in Manzini, Swaziland (present-day Eswatini) to Elroy Mayisela and Lynette Sibongile Masuku.

[1] Her father was a high school teacher and her mother, later an academic and conservationist, was a teaching student at the University of Swaziland at the time of Van Damme's birth.

[5] On 30 May 2014, she additionally became one of the DA's two national spokespersons: in anticipation of an increased workload, she and Marius Redelinghuys were jointly appointed to replace Mmusi Maimane, who had been elected as Leader of the Opposition.

[14] During her first year as a parliamentarian Van Damme was viewed as a "rising star" in the DA,[12] and Forbes Magazine named her one of its 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa in December 2014.

[17] Shortly after her ascension to Parliament, Van Damme was the target of a "birtherist" scandal about her South African citizenship, inaugurated by a Sunday Times article published on 29 June 2014 under the headline "DA MP a liar and fraud".

[18] One party spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa, suggested that the DA should "apologise to the people of South Africa for misleading and lying to them" and another, Moloto Mothapo, suggested that Van Damme's election showed that "in its window-dressing exercise of desperately recruiting and parading black people to conceal its real identity, the DA has cut corners".

[3] In subsequent reporting, the Sunday Times challenged this account, claiming that Van Damme and her mother had previously been alerted to and warned against the misrepresentation.

[19] Nonetheless, the DA said that although Van Damme was not a South African citizen by birth, she was entitled to citizenship by descent through her biological father and grandparents.

[28][29] Shortly afterwards, Van Damme was one of 20 women named by Vital Voices as a VV Engage Fellow, in which capacity she participated in a year-long, part-time leadership development programme.

[36][37] In the autumn of 2017, the South African press broke the story of an apparent fake news campaign coordinated by British public relations firm Bell Pottinger and calculated to inflame racial tensions in order to deflect from allegations that the Gupta family had captured the Zuma administration.

[39] In August 2017, Van Damme travelled to London, England to present evidence against Bell Pottinger during an PRCA hearing into the firm's conduct.

[41][42] Through her role in the campaign against Bell Pottinger, Van Damme acquired a reputation as an authority on political disinformation and was invited to speak on the subject on international platforms.

[45] On 5 December 2020, Van Damme was sacked as Shadow Minister of Communications by John Steenhuisen, who had recently replaced Maimane as DA federal leader.

[46] The evening before the shadow cabinet announcement, Van Damme had complained on Twitter that Steenhuisen had granted her unsolicited medical leave, labelled a "sabbatical".

[62] Van Damme responded that this was a "blatant untruth", since Google had also been scheduled to attend; she accused Facebook of withdrawing because "it feared having to answer tough questions" about its updated Whatsapp privacy policy, which had been widely criticised, including by the South African Information Regulator.

[74] In September 2021, she launched the Local Government Anti-Disinformation Project, the aim of which was advocacy and monitoring in relation to political misinformation and disinformation on social media.

[80] In addition to broader tech governance policy, Van Damme has a special interest in combatting online harassment of women.

She is a member of the advisory councils of #ShePersisted and the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse,[80] and she spoke on the subject at the 2023 Summit for Democracy.

[81] In 2017 Van Damme married Stian Tvede Karlsen, a Norwegian public relations professional, in a traditional wedding ceremony.

[86] After a complaint by Van Damme, the V&A Waterfront publicly apologised for the manner in which its security manager had responded to the incident, saying that it lacked empathy and objectivity.