The agencies in Delhi who we work with don't tell us any details, and we don't ask," he said. We got a target in August to follow him and engage with his tweets, and we did. Joe Biden the person is irrelevant to us. "Political parties are our main clients, but even brands and celebrities who need promotion come our way," Yajpal said. "We get daily targets from agencies in Delhi and Mumbai, and we simply engage with the target as we're told." "Each one of us controls two to three hundred profiles across different platforms," Yajpal said in Hindi, his only language. His IT services agency, as he calls his one-room setup, now employs six people in addition to him and his brother Rajpal. The high-school dropout invested in 5 PCs and a broadband connection in 2016. Yajpal Yadav, based in the eastern India town of Patna, has a similar story. My wife got herself trained in Photoshop and now we offer not only these services, but also content creation" that includes making memes. "I came to this because of my ideology," said Patel, who's a member of the youth wing of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, "but then this became my profession. They offer nearly anything to paying customers, according to Patel: fake news, Photoshopped images, support and "hate" campaigns, and even incitements of mob violence. Started mostly to serve the 2014 Narendra Modi campaign, India's troll farm business is now one of the most decentralized and robust in the world. Using aliases-each worker controls several hundred-they schedule tweets, check engagement stats and, at the close of their shifts, fill up a spreadsheet with their analytics from the previous day. A Google Doc tells each one of them who to follow, who to retweet, what to retweet and what comments to leave on specific posts. in California.įour of his employees, young men who live in the neighborhood, take their stations at long desks that line two walls of the tiny shop, and open up task sheets assigned to them. What Patel means by "this" is the business of running a troll farm after his shutters go down at 8:00 p.m.-which is 10:30 a.m. Things changed in 2012–13 when Modi started his campaign for prime minister. But that didn't even cover the costs of maintaining the PCs and paying the electricity bill. We had to rely on passengers asking to print railway tickets, fill up online forms, and get documents photocopied. But then internet became so cheap and everyone got smartphones and business petered out. "Back then, men came in mostly for chatting in IRC rooms and surfing porn. "This was started as an internet café by my father in the late 1990s," Patel said, speaking in Gujarati-accented Hindi. On the side, he and his Photoshop-savvy wife Sejal make photocopies, print ID cards, do small design jobs and offer lamination services. From 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, he scans IDs of customers and allots them a PC for twenty rupees an hour. Patel runs a small cybercafé near the railway station at Umbergaon, a small town four hours north of Mumbai near the Maharashtra-Gujarat interstate border. In discussions over the Telegram app, Harshit Patel and Yajpal Yadav discussed the part they played. Some of the operators who worked on the campaign spoke at length about how propaganda agencies in New Delhi and Mumbai activated a widely distributed troll network to amplify Biden's campaign impact on Twitter. Kamala Harris's ethic heritage is in part rooted in India, but her share of Indian and apparently Indian followers is far lower, about 0.12 percent. And a large number of the users are located in small towns in rural India-in places where English-speakers are rare, and from handles run by people who don't speak English as their first language, nor appear to be genuinely invested in American politics.Ī Zenger News investigation reveals that Biden's increasing social media footprint in India came from the country's infamous troll farms boosting his candidacy. A large number of Twitter accounts that followed Biden's appear to have been created exclusively for that purpose. The number hit 11 million by the third week of October.Ī close examination has revealed unusual patterns. Within two weeks of Biden selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12, his Twitter following jumped by 738,595 new followers-a 9.1 percent leap. Joe Biden's Twitter account got a sizable boost beginning in August from tens of thousands of fake followers purchased on the open market from troll farms in rural India, an investigation has found.
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