The Rise of Fake News And What It Means Today

'... Only last month, the Huffington Post published an expose on a similar issue – right before the Lok Sabha Elections in 2014, Narendra Modi, the then Prime Ministerial candidate and Amit Shah, his trusted aide and the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, planned to start an NGO for acid attack survivors which would eventually be used as a secret method to garner votes for Modi in the upcoming elections. His campaign advisor, Prashant Kishor and his wife would play an important role in this exercise. Modi and Shah would not obviously be related to the NGO – they would be behind-the-scenes, in order to ward off any suspicion or questions. The modus operandi of the NGO would be to track and code poll data and user profiles and use the same to manipulate people to vote for the BJP by spreading content targeted for specific audience profiles. However, after their unprecedented win in the 2014 elections, the Modi-Shah duo discarded this experiment, until the Bihar state elections in 2015 which was a phenomenal loss for the BJP.

As the article goes on to explain, the idea was to revive the previous plan and work the NGO, now named Association of Billion Minds (ABM) so that it “conceives, designs, executes and memeifies many of the party’s campaigns — including “Main bhi Chowkidar”, “Nation with NaMo”, and “Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat” — and makes them viral across a network of Facebook pages with millions of followers. Nation with NaMo and Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat are coordinated online and offline campaigns in which speeches, rallies and public events in the physical world are quickly turned into digital content for online platforms. The pages are designed to look like Modi fan pages, rather than the work of ABM or the BJP.”...'