Benjamin Strick Profile picture
Investigations Director @Cen4infoRes. Past BBC & @Bellingcat. Tutorials: https://t.co/jwll4Af0ax. OSINT/GEOINT. Views my own.

Apr 17, 2021, 6 tweets

The tag #Remove1991WorshipAct is trending in India today. In fact, it was sitting at #3 in the country a few hours ago.

There's a campaign pushing a specific narrative behind it in a very coordinated way.

Let's take a look at how it works👇 /1

The campaign is first circulated around in a WhatsApp message like this.

It has a directive, time, and a Google Drive link. If you're new to Indian social media campaigns - this is common practice to amplify specific issues, especially during elections. 2/

In the Google Drive is a few documents with lists of suggested tweet texts in English & Hindi.

What's interesting is that there's also a 'click to tweet' option, which fills out a tweet by clicking on the link. So it's not really copy and paste anymore, but click and click. 3/

Here's an example of how those 'click to tweet' links work.

Note - this was performed for research purposes only. I do not endorse the suggested content. 4/

The Google Drive also contains a number of suggested images to be used in the campaign. I'd say if you're seeing these in the #Remove1991WorshipAct tweets today, they're going to be part of this effort. 5/

These campaigns are pretty repetitious, for example this is the result of a search for the text:

"Considering it marks a positive step towards Hindus long-standing efforts to reclaim their religious places of worship which were converted into mosques by Islamic invaders" 6/

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