When Swati Chaturvedi wrote her book, I Am a Troll, a couple of years ago, we all got an insight into the workings of the BJP's infamous IT cell and the way its mighty, vicious troll army functioned. Recently we received yet more insight into the way the BJP uses Twitter to its political advantage; how ministers and party workers are instructed to tweet along party lines. Altnews.in’s Pratik Sinha managed to show us exactly how:
Altnews.in is a fact-checking and fake news busting website that painstakingly checks images, videos, news reports to counter the WhatsApp University type of propaganda that inundates us daily. It is a sort of Indian snopes.com. Pratik Sinha is the founder and editor of the website and leads a team of social activists, engineers, journalists and scientists who trawl the web to spot and combat misinformation of politics, gender, caste, religion and more. As the website screen grab shows, the team tackles fake news emanating from both sides of the political divide.
It was a little experiment designed to demonstrate the Ctrl C, Ctrl V type of tweets that BJP functionaries put out on a daily basis. The tweet template published is copied and faithfully pasted by everyone from workers to union ministers. Sinha accessed the Google document of the IT cell and edited it.
By changing / adding just a word here and a word there, Sinha managed to get a Union Minister to tweet that "working for the middle class is low on the agenda of Modi Govt"
This little exercise makes BJP’s concerted Twitter strategy glaringly obvious. Supporters, members and paid tweeple clearly tweet in concert; as directed.
People were tweeting the exact same thing. Bizarrely they were replicating the same mistakes and saying the same uncomplimentary things about the BJP and their leader.
It became clear that the copy-paste brigade was so used to tweeting precisely as directed that there was zero application of mind on display here.
As this tweet says, this was rather like Chatur Ramalingam in 3 Idiots who was the butt of a practical joke because Rancho decided to play mischief substituting a few words with others.
As this tweet points out, even after the expose was made public, some Twitter handles did not bother to delete their tweets.
Pratik Sinha's work and in particular this expose of his has earned the appreciation of many.
For the party at the centre, this will likely have major repercussions. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people still trying to figure out what hit them.
…There are none so blind as those who refuse to see, suggests this tweet. Unfortunately, those who blindly support the powers that will be find ways to explain away even this.
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