Of The Crafty World of War Rooms, D.O.O.M., Blurred Lines and Gloomy Races

MisDisMal-Information Edition 35

Apr 04, 2021

What is this? MisDisMal-Information (Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation) aims to track information disorder and the information ecosystem largely from an Indian perspective. It will also look at some global campaigns and research.

What this is not? A fact-check newsletter. There are organisations like Altnews, Boomlive, etc., who already do some great work. It may feature some of their fact-checks periodically.

Welcome to Edition 35 of MisDisMal-Information

DOOM and The Crafty World of War Rooms

Over the last few weeks, it has been hard to miss coverage of social media war rooms that various political parties have put in place for this assembly election season. And in the midst of a pandemic, it isn't surprising that this concept is getting a lot more purchase than it already would, considering the belief that the BJP owes much of its success to its dominant digital presence (you may or may not agree with that).

I've listed a few articles I came across. A few things stood out to me in reading some of this coverage - data, online platforms, organisation and money. In some cases, there were strong elements of buzzword bingo. And a lot of stress on the age of those operating these war rooms, i.e. 'young people'. Oh, and also, an implied shift from an art to a craft.

Now, let's try and distil them into Data, Online, Organisation and Money.

Data

Using surveys and analytics to determine the impact of announcements, moves, etc. (5).
Crunching numbers from past elections (5).
At least some politicians who questioned didn't think they needed such analysis in the past are now coming around to relying on it - DMK example from (6).

Online

AIADMK's IT wing reportedly has 80,000 Whatsapp groups and 150 members. The secretary of AIADMK's IT Wing states that it micro-targets content across Whatsapp groups for 'students, professionals, housewives, pensioners, etc.' (1). Apparently, campaign pages on its website do not always work (4).
DMK, working with IPAC, has an app for Stalin that claims to have over 8L downloads (1). Users get 'good karma' points when they share content from it (4).
BJP
- In Tamil Nadu, it generates 15-20 pieces of content per day for Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Twitter (1).
- In Kerala, it has a 40 member team, organises digital conclaves (2), and 10 rooms for its teams to work from (3).
Congress / UDF
- In Kerala, it claims to have more than 30,000 centrally coordinated groups (2). It sends updates and posters on groups meant for people outside the party and also claims that more than 10M people are part of these groups that belong to the party's Kerala unit (2).
CPI(M) / LDF
- Social media appears to be an also-ran, with 'word of mouth' and political campaigns being labelled as 'what has worked' (2). Whatsapp appears to be the main channel of outreach/communication (2, 3).

Organisation

AIADMK, a report suggests this wing is "one lakh strong" without accounting for thousands of freelancers (4).
DMK claims to have built a team of 28,000 and mapped them down to 'the booth level' (4). IPAC has put 400 employees on the job as well.
BJP
- In Tamil Nadu, a war room for each constituency.
- In Kerala, candidates have their own teams for social media. And a national team that coordinates with local teams (2). 5 electoral booths roll up into one 'sakthi kendra' (3).
Congress / LDF
- In Kerala, separate Whatsapp groups per constituency and mandal. Social Media strategy has not been outsourced with state and central units coordinating (2). Candidates' teams manage their own social media presence. An element of centralisation comes in, reportedly, with aspects like trending topics, etc., being handled by the Media Committee.
- An aside of sorts - Saubhadra Chatterji writes about the physical space in New Delhi where the Congress' social media wing operates from [HindustanTimes]. It wasn't that long ago that the party was looking to add 'social media warriors' and set itself a target of 5 lakh[The Hindu]. Shortly after that, state units in Bihar [TOI] and Tripura [Indian Express] echoed these calls.
CPI(M) / LDF
- It has a central 'war room' supporting both the digital and print campaign (3). There seems to be a specific focus on addressing information disorder, but there is no central team coordinating this aspect (2).

Money

From (4), which also reported that IPAC's fee (DMK) was around INR 350 crore starting in 2019.

The fears of a second wave of Covid-19, changing demographics, and a high smartphone penetration in the State in excess of 50 per cent, has forced the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to invest more than ₹100 crore, and an army of thousands of paid and volunteer warriors, on digital campaigns alone in a month leading up to the April 6, 2021 vote.

There are also allegations of UPI based payments to prospective voters in TN. [Poornima Murali - News18]
I didn't see a lot of other reports around costs/expenditure (if you did, please reach out!) but the ad transparency pages maintained by Google (Political ADs for India) and Facebook (Ad Library for India) give some perspective too. The Web Interfaces aren't very useful, and honestly, pretty clunky. They do offer csv downloads, but any sort of filtering needs to be manual. So, if you're diving into these files, be ready to spend hours and hours trying to make sense of them.

Also, pat yourself on the back if you realised these four can be acronym-ed as DOOM. To be honest, there's not a whole lot that's surprising here. Of course, election campaigns will rely heavily on online discourse (for understanding and pushing narratives), just like they do all year round. What I worry about is that the nature of this discourse and the incentives it creates. Remember the Negative Positive feedback loop from Edition 16. I've since refined it a little and will continue to do so (probably better viewed on a large screen).

Then there's what platforms are doing.

Twitter: Reports that it hasn't seen 'specific focused' platform manipulation but acknowledges there were attempts to disrupt conversations. And its actions include prebunks on subjects like EVMs and indelible ink(Edition 24 covered prebunks), cross-cultural teams monitoring conversations that can lead to offline harm, and, generally, more enforcement. [Anumeha Chaturvedi - ET]. Blog posts earlier in March also stressed the multilingual nature of its interventions and its intentions to take action against misleading content. All the best!
Facebook: Said it would curb hate speech. Its blog post on the subject recounted its other policies - reducing distribution of content determined to be false by third-party fact-checkers and by repeat offenders who have repeatedly violated their policies. Aside, in December 2020, I wrote for TheQuint about 'Super-Disinformers'.
Google: Google's News Initiative announced that it would run a series of online training sessions for journalists in 'Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Puducherry and Assam – in English and local languages'. [Financial Express]
Sharechat: Sharechat is, well, reportedly experimenting with political ads in Tamil Nadu. [Surabhi Agarwal - ET] I hope they've spent time learning from the many missteps of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Aside: This is anything but a given; for example, TikTok took a while to anticipate how it would be used in Myanmar [Rest of World]

My favourite quote from some of this coverage (2) (Note: This is part of a direct quote)

In 2016 a report said social media can influence decision making in 70% of the constituencies. In 2021 this number can only be more than that

Maybe, verbal conversations should require citations too.

Blurred Lines And a Gloomy Race to the Bottom

Was the Prime Minister of India waving at an imaginary crowd at an airport (not a tunnel)? Well, no. This has been fact-checked by AltNews, BoomLive, TheQuint relatively quickly. There were, in fact, blurred lines of people.

Ok, Prateek, why are you talking about individual fact-checks? You rarely do that.

You’re right, that’s deliberate. I happened to come across this grainy video on Twitter yesterday. And the poor video quality certainly raised some suspicion. It was also interesting that the main sources of the video were two handles affiliated with a political party (INC, in this case - but the specific party isn’t relevant). One of these has been flagged by Twitter as manipulated (and I’ve added that to my flagged tweet tracker) and Twitter Moment, one hasn’t.

Before going ahead, let’s travel back in time. About a year ago, in Edition 1, I had covered a study by Syeda Zainab Akbar, Divyanshu Kukreti, Somya Sagarika and Joyojeet Pal titled ‘Temporal Patterns in COVID-19 misinformation in India’. Based on the dataset of fact-checked articles they got from Tattle, I conducted a little side-analysis of my own. I tried to categorise them based on:

Target: Domestic (in India)/ International
Political leaning: Left, Right or Indeterminate

I then excluded the ‘International’ ones and plotted what was left. This is subjective and not without its flaws. The clear trend though was that right-leaning misleading pieces of information seemed to significantly outnumber the left-leaning ones. (Source spreadsheet is here - remember, this was a dip-stick kind of analysis, so it isn’t well annotated or anything)

Now, let’s end our little time travel (the only kind of travel we can do in a pandemic) adventure. I’ve been anecdotally observing fact-checked items this assembly election, and my very strong hunch now is that this difference is unlikely to be as vast. One can debate that qualitatively, one set of narratives are more harmful than others, or that quantitatively seeing this through would be futile (if someone wants to though, that would be great. And in my opinion, not futile).

My concern though is that we have front row seats to a race to the bottom as more individuals/entities seem to be seeing the advantages of this post-and-forget misleading content. But, as we all know, the lifecycle of an individual piece of content may be short but the degradation of the information ecosystem is long-lasting and ongoing.

And really, this is why I, rather pessimistically (and exaggeratedly), equated social media focused election war rooms with D.O.O.M. in this edition

P.S. I will try to be less ‘doom and gloom’y in the next edition.

Event update from Takshashila

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The Information Ecologist

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