Disinformation targets right-wing audiences, Indians

Since the fall of the Awami League government in August, a surge of disinformation about Bangladesh has flooded social media sites. Accounts on X.com (formerly Twitter) are especially guilty of peddling such disinformation, and they are targeting audiences both inside and outside India with a focus on narratives that align with Indian right-wing or ultra-nationalist ideologies.

Tech Global Institute, an independent tech policy nonprofit, analysed 100 unique social media posts that were randomly sampled from a dataset of 1000 posts relating to specific hashtags, topics, or user activity between July 26 and November 26, and revealed its findings in a report titled "The Anatomy of Disinformation on X".

Disinformation across social media platforms, mainly on X

Tech Global Institute (TGI) found that 77 percent of the posts they analysed were found on X, with the other 23 percent found on Facebook and YouTube. When it comes to the distribution of these posts, 35 percent were cross-posted on all three platforms, while 71 percent of the posts were shared via private messaging services such as Messenger and WhatsApp.

Of the four months worth of social media posts scrutinised by TGI, a touch over 30 percent of the posts were made in August. The number of such posts made in September and October were relatively low, but disinformation exploded on X in November, surpassing all three past months, with over 40 percent of the content analysed posted then.

TGI found that this spike in disinformation in November coincided with a 214 percent increase in new accounts on X linked to disinformation about Bangladesh from August-September to October-November.

'Plight' of Hindu community the dominant narrative

The posts analysed in the TGI report point to a prevalence of a few specific narratives.

The "mass violence and killings of the Hindu community" featured in 27 percent of the posts analysed, while 21 percent were distortion of facts about hyperlocal incidents into false communal narratives.

Other dominant narratives include people facing discrimination and/or assault due to religion (18 percent), vandalism of Hindu properties and temples (9 percent), claims about annexation of territory (6 percent), claims about Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus's (5 percent) and the interim government's (5 percent) "association" with terror groups, calls for violence or boycott of Bangladesh (3 percent), and claims about Hindu women being victims of mass rape or sexual assault (3 percent). The remaining 4 percent of analysed posts were not tied to the key narratives mentioned above.

TGI ascertained with "some confidence that these accounts are likely [to be] operating out of India or their content coincides with Indian ultranationalist groups, and [are] meant to reach audiences both inside and outside India".

In order to make this observation, they looked for and found certain signals in social media posts, such as a focus on narratives aligning with Indian right-wing or ultra-nationalist ideologies; referring to content from right-wing media outlets in India; using Hindi in profile names, posts and comments; frequently tagging Indian political figures; coordinated engagement efforts meant to amplify the reach of posts; use of similar hashtags; use of vernacular specific to Indian culture; and the general focus on Indian ultra-nationalist politics.

Tactics commonly used by disinformation agents

The report boiled down recent disinformation campaigns to a handful of generalised tactics used on social media, some of which have been used by Russian and Chinese campaigns on social media in the past.

The most prevalent and repetitive tactic is to distort facts about hyperlocal events and giving them a communal spin to heighten tensions. An example that was used in the report featured the video of a mentally ill man wielding a stick and scaring students in a classroom at Sir Salimullah Medical College in Dhaka. Many users in X shared this video with captions insinuating the person was a "violent Islamist" or that Bangladesh is being Talibanised.

Another tactic mentioned is the exaggeration of claims about killings and mass violence, like sharing images of a protest in Chattogram that resulted in injuries with captions falsely claiming that the army and Jamaat-e-Islami had attacked and killed/injured 50 Hindus.

Social media posts also saw widespread discrediting of the interim government and false claims the chief adviser or other student leaders in government positions had ties to terrorist groups.

Some posts and accounts also sought to create fake evidence of grassroots campaigning in support of their false claims. X user accounts with names such as "Voices of Bangladeshi Hindus" or "Hindu Voice" were used for this tactic.

Disinformation also infiltrated mainstream media, where many false claims were broadcast only to be proven false later on by independent fact checkers. For example, many Indian outlets even carried the false claim that Saiful Islam Alif, a lawyer who died during a clash between supports of former ISKCON leader Chinmoy and law enforcers, was actually Chinmoy's counsel. It was later proved that he was not related to the case.

TGI says the degree of foreign disinformation faced by Bangladesh is not yet on the scale of campaigns typically run by China, Iran, Russia, or India. They suggest added attention be paid to the underlying issues of national security and foreign policy that are leading to the origination of these threats.

Apon Das, a research associate at Tech Global Institute and a co-author of the report, says, "For most of our fact-checking efforts, we are mainly focused on Facebook and dependent on local news organisations. They establish facts and we wait for them. But when there's some sort of gap in their reporting, when people are still eager to know about an incident, that is where disinformation finds a space to grow."

He suggests that more research is needed in this sphere. Fact-checking cannot remain an exercise limited to local networks.

"We need to start looking at foreign nationals when they speak about Bangladesh, and continue research on foreign disinformation."