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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/matthieuC on 2023-09-27 09:17:31.
Inside the vast digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India
Submitted 2 years ago by bot@lemmit.online [bot] to worldnews@lemmit.online
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/26/hindu-nationalist-social-media-hate-campaign/
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 2 years ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups have been in the global vanguard of using social media for political aims — to advance their ideology and cement their grip over the world’s largest electoral democracy.
Just this month, the world’s attention was urgently focused on the conduct of the Modi government, after Canada alleged that Indian agents may have assassinated a prominent Sikh separatist on Canadian soil, again raising questions about the efforts of Western countries to draw closer to New Delhi.
In extensive interviews, BJP staffers and the party’s allies revealed how they conceive and craft posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority, and detailed how they had assembled a sprawling apparatus of 150,000 social media workers to propagate this content across a vast network of WhatsApp groups.
It was approaching noon one day this spring, and Ajith Kumar Ullal, the BJP’s social media head in Mangaluru, had been up for seven hours, barking orders over a droning air conditioner that struggled to match the south India heat.
During an election in Gujarat state, the party used software written in Python code that could hijack WhatsApp’s web interface to spread attack ads to tens of thousands of recipients with just a few clicks, according to an internal presentation seen by The Post.
But his social media exploits and his reach helped garner him an unusual level of influence for a 10th-grade dropout who had never held a regular job: The chief minister of Karnataka shared Astra posts on Facebook, and Poojary said he would get calls from other top government and party officials.
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