Thread by @billyperrigo

Exclusive: India’s ruling party is creating WhatsApp groups on an industrial scale ahead of elections this spring. My investigation found those group chats include widespread fake news and religious hatred (THREAD)
time.com/5512032/whatsa…

There are hundreds of thousands of groups supporting the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP. In one, called “Vote for Modi,” party supporters shared this image of a Hindu priest being hanged, and said ‘Jihadis’ were responsible. [Warning: graphic]

In fact, as @jigneshinfo from @AltNews investigated, six Hindus and no Muslims were arrested for the murder. The image was shared to whip up Hindu nationalist feelings in the BJP’s base, despite the accompanying info being false. But that’s not all.

I spoke to @ShivamShankarS, a former BJP data analyst who left the party last year. He won’t like the comparison, but he’s basically the Indian equivalent of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, @chrisinsilico.
time.com/5512032/whatsa…

Shivam told me the BJP is linking electoral roll data with phone numbers, electricity bills and religion and caste data, in order to profile voters and send them targeted political messages (and fake news). The BJP deny this.

That’s eerily similar to what Cambridge Analytica did in 2016, just using Facebook instead of WhatsApp as their platform. So, what are the BJP's alleged methods?

Electricity data, Shivam told me, is a good indicator of how rich a person is. That means they can be sorted into a group chat for their economic status, in which party policies that might disadvantage them are not mentioned. (TIME saw evidence of this.)

And in India, where your name says so much about your religion and/or caste, it’s not hard to sort people by those qualities either. In the 2017 state elections in Uttar Pradesh, Shivam says, the BJP created group chats along caste lines. *This is massive.*

When I put this to the BJP, they denied all the allegations. A spokesperson told me: “no such official groups [were] created on caste lines.” And they said they only use phone numbers offered up to them, rather than scraping.

Note the word “official.” Because it is only loosely-affiliated volunteers and supporters operating these groups, the BJP can keep a level of plausible deniability over what’s shared inside them, analysts told me.

“You would never see any kind of fake news or messaging on the verified accounts of any political party,” @ShivamShankarS says. “But these messages are basically shared on group chats.”

It’s not just the BJP doing this. But they pioneered the trend that all Indian political parties now follow. And they got there before WhatsApp started banning suspicious group creation, @sbasu_in tells me, which means their existing groups are insulated from the crackdown.

More details and context in my story. Big thanks to all those who helped, particularly @sangeetamptra's excellent research for the initial inspiration, @free_thinker, @ShivamShankarS, @sbasu_in, @PoMoGandhi and the ever-amazing @naina_bajekal for editing
time.com/5512032/whatsa…