For our first investigation we partnered with Srishti Jaswal and Rest Of World for a case study on how India’s Bharatiya Janata Party used WhatsApp to spread propaganda in one Indian town.
You can read Inside The BJP’s WhatsApp Machine on Rest of World.
For anyone not familiar with Indian politics, the BJP most recently came to power in 2014, led by Narendra Modi, who has been India’s prime minister since that time–and who is poised to dominate the election underway in India this spring, fueled partially by a sophisticated approach to propaganda that oftentimes involves anti-Muslim rhetoric.
WhatsApp has become a key tool for the BJP, which puts out messages through a network of thousands of official party chat groups. Just in Mandi, the small Indian town that was the focus of our investigation, a BJP worker told Rest of World they had a volunteer team of 500 members running social media operations, including overseeing around 400 WhatsApp groups, with the goal of adding 200 more by the time of the elections That army of volunteers runs groups targeting voters based on their location, as well as their profession, age, religion, gender, caste, and tribe.
At the same time, in spite of considerable efforts, Rest Of World was unable to find any WhatsApp groups associated with other political parties, either because such groups didn’t exist or weren’t as popular in the region.
To understand how the BJP’s WhatsApp infrastructure reacts during prime political events, we studied messages from 20 WhatsApp groups beginning a couple of weeks before what many considered to be the beginning of Modi’s 2024 election campaign: The Ram Temple inauguration in Ayodhya in January. The temple's site, which housed a mosque for 500 years, has long been a subject of political and religious contention and propaganda. The BJP and Modi have long tied the construction to their political ambitions.
The groups in our sample fell into roughly one of three categories: political, surrogate and organic. Political groups were officially run by party workers and had names of politicians or the BJP in the title, often including the word “official.” Surrogate groups did not self identify as being political or official party groups. We learned through reporting that they were either managed or administrated by party workers. Organic groups were those created for sharing local news and information by Mandi's governance bodies, groups created to share religious content, and other community-led groups that shared relevant, but non-political content with the local community.
Our key findings are below but for a detailed breakdown of our analysis, including its limitations please read our methodology.
We found that since WhatsApp doesn't have a mechanism for identifying political groups, as Facebook does, WhatsApp allows political parties (in this case the BJP) to blur the lines between political and personal speech.
This blurring happens in two ways.
First, it enables political parties to share controversial messages without attribution, and therefore without consequences. Rest Of World learned through interviews with local BJP leaders that they use unofficial or “surrogate” groups to share content that isn't appropriate for official party channels, including cartoons, jokes, satire targeting opposition and critics, dis- and misinformation, and hate speech. Sometimes, BJP admins even use proxy WhatsApp numbers to share such posts.
Second, it enables BJP workers to create astroturf campaigns that voters might perceive as organic support for the party's message. Our analysis found a surge in message volume around the time of the Ram Temple inauguration that was almost entirely driven by political and surrogate groups belonging to the BJP, not organic groups. The daily message average for political groups and surrogate groups almost doubled during the inauguration period compared to the two weeks before, while those for organic groups remained relatively unchanged.
The significance of this spike can also be observed by normalizing the daily counts for all three categories, so that their message volumes are divided by their average daily volume in the seven-day “pre-inauguration” timeframe noted above. It's also notable that the volume of messages drops sharply after the inauguration.
This spike in posts was almost entirely related to Ram Temple related content. Our analysis also found that highly-forwarded messages (those forwarded 2 or more times) about the temple were much more likely to promote Hinduism than messages that were not about the temple, and were slightly more likely to express anti-Muslim sentiment. In addition, we identified no messages about the temple inauguration that promoted opposition parties or disparaged the BJP. Given how the BJP has used the temple in its political messaging, a pro-Hindu message in this context is also pro-BJP.
Since WhatsApp does not label accounts nor groups as belonging to political parties, an average voter may find it difficult to distinguish campaign messaging from organic community activity. It appears that campaigns took advantage of this ambiguity in their messaging about the Ram Temple inauguration, spreading its messages through“surrogate” groups that voters may mistake as organic community groups.
While our focus was on one town in India, it is likely that this same information ecosystem is replicated in other parts of the country. As our investigation shows, the BJP relies heavily on WhatsApp for its campaign operations and everything we’ve learned suggests that the strategies we witnessed are not unique to Mandi. Such loopholes in WhatsApp’s features are also available to any political party that has the resources to replicate the BJP’s strategy.
WhatsApp has invested heavily in fact-checking and forwarding limits to tackle the spread of inauthentic content on the platform. Both of these solutions try to address the issue at the level of the individual message which our study finds inadequate. A motivated actor with resources can still exploit the platform as a sanctuary for astroturfing campaigns.
This investigation is the first of our WhatsApp Watch project. If you are interested in learning about new work please sign up for our newsletter.
Image caption: Ayodhya, India. 26th Dec, 2023. View of the premises of a temple in Ayodhya, showing the cutouts of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindu Lord Ram. Credit: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News
