‘Cyber warriors’ likely to sway Indian election

NEW DELHI: India’s election watchdog says it has forced Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to take down hundreds of posts during the country’s election but experts say it is just a drop in an ocean of misinformation that has engulfed voters.

The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress party have thrown armies of “cyber warriors” into a bitter social media war for the six weeks of voting that ends on Sunday.

The arch-rivals accuse each other of deploying social media dark arts such as automated bots and trolls to bombard voters with messages, fake and real.

No blow has been too low in the war of words and videos between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.

Real-life insults traded by the two – Gandhi calling Modi a “thief”, Modi deriding his opponent as pappu, or “fool” – get shared thousands of times on WhatsApp and Twitter within minutes.

But so do photoshopped images of longtime foe Pakistan’s flag at Gandhi rallies, or Modi dining with Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan.

The origin of these images is unknown, but both have been debunked by fact-checkers during this campaign.

And experts say the fake news on a host of apps is swaying votes.

The 2019 poll has been “an app-based election where along with the positive voter engagement drives, WhatsApp, ShareChat, Helo, TikTok and Instagram are being used for propaganda and misinformation campaigns,” said Asia politics researcher Sangeeta Mahapatra.

Senior Congress politician Shashi Tharoor said in a recent editorial that there was a “danger” that “many votes will be cast on the basis of disinformation”.

Both the BJP and Congress have each spent tens of millions of dollars to reach the 900 million electorate who have become huge consumers of phone content.

Some 500 million Indians have internet access – with 300 million on Facebook and more than 250 million using WhatsApp.

The BJP, the bigger and richer of the two parties, and Congress have hundreds of fulltime social media workers.