New Delhi, India — In an unfurnished flat in a nondescript Ahmedabad neighbourhood in western India, a 22-year-old digital content creator worked through the nights, designing posters and editing videos for a presidential campaign thousands of kilometres away — William Ruto’s 2022 bid for the presidency in Kenya. Rajan Kumar’s content was not shared by Ruto’s official campaign. Instead, the 50 social media posts he created for $7 a day were shared on shadow social media accounts that conceal their identity to make coordinated messaging appear independent while backing Ruto’s campaign.
For content, Kumar said he would trim opposing leaders’ speeches or interviews to twist their statements, or create posters with false claims amplifying Ruto’s prospects and popularity ahead of the election. It’s one of the easiest ways to discredit,” Kumar told Al Jazeera, adding that “all controversial content” is diverted to shadow pages for “extensive distribution”. Ruto won the 2022 election and became Kenya’s fifth president.
Four years later, as the United States heads into its midterm elections on Tuesday, researchers have found that Indian social media bots and accounts have been shadow-posting videos backing specific campaigns. The New York Times first reported such posts supporting US Democratic politician Haley Stevens ahead of the August 4 Senate primary in Michigan, which she lost to Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s candidate for the midterm election. But the US is only the latest theatre of electoral war where politicians are banking on Indian social media mercenaries-for-hire, who have fought shadow election campaigns in several countries in South America and Africa.
Nearly a dozen political consultants in India, who spoke with Al Jazeera for this report, say there are no limits, guardrails, or red lines in such shadow campaigns. There is no free will for voters. Everything is manipulated.” Political consultancies advise politicians and election campaigns on how to win public support and elections.
Such specialised private companies selling political persuasion as a service emerged in the US in the 1930s. With the boom in social media, dirty tricks have spread to online platforms to manipulate and attract voters, especially by running targeted advertising campaigns on Meta and Google platforms to reach millions of voters. Previous reports have found that Russia used similar tactics to influence voters in the US, for instance.
Strategies for dissemination of content deemed too controversial for official accounts during election campaigns vary, ranging from political consultancies taking over a party’s established shadow pages on Meta or Google to making new ones from scratch, rebranding existing pages to suit a campaign’s needs, or opting for pages for hire. An Al Jazeera investigation in the run-up to India’s 2024 national election revealed a sprawling network of such shadowy pages on Meta and Google products like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube on sale — skirting the platforms’ policies against such misuse of targeted advertisements to influence voters. Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous group of disinformation researchers that investigates and exposes coordinated online influence operations, particularly those linked to Russia, told Al Jazeera that it found at least 28 such accounts on X (formerly Twitter) sharing videos supporting Stevens’s campaign in the Democratic primary in Michigan, garnering more than seven million views.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
