Bots and Indian TV push fake news about Canada in wake of Hindu temple clashes
A wave of misinformation about Canadian institutions is being amplified by suspected bot accounts on social media and by pro-Modi news outlets in India, raising concerns it could imperil relations between Sikhs and Hindus in Canada.
CBC News reviewed hundreds of posts on X and dozens of hours of footage streamed on YouTube in the days before and after clashes outside Hindu temples in Surrey, B.C., and Brampton, Ont., in November.
The analysis identified several posts containing misleading and inflammatory comments about the Khalistan movement — which advocates for an independent state for Sikhs — and Sikh Canadians in general that were recirculated by suspicious accounts.
Some of these claims were then repeated on Indian media outlets sympathetic to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A parallel analysis of pro-Khalistan accounts also revealed numerous unverified claims, but only marginal amplification by suspected bots.
Even before last month’s clashes, the media monitoring unit at Global Affairs Canada had reported “Modi-aligned” media outlets in India were pushing “often heated” narratives claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is beholden to Khalistani extremists.
The steadfast opposition to the Khalistan movement is an integral part of a Hindu nationalist ideology the Modi government has been pushing both domestically and abroad, said Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
“The violence of those demonstrations [in Brampton and Surrey] suggests that that agenda has been pushed in [Canada] a good deal more than any of us realized,” Elcock said.
Sense of insecurity following clashes
Sikh separatists have been demonstrating outside consular events at Hindu temples since Trudeau alleged the Indian government was involved in the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan activist, in Surrey.
These demonstrations, though small, are often held near the temple entrance and can feature provocative slogans, such as “Who supports Nijjar’s killers: Hindu temple.”
Last month, demonstrations in Surrey and Brampton were met by counter-protesters. A series of confrontations ensued over a 48-hour period, resulting in several arrests and condemnation from politicians across the spectrum.
“Virtually everybody who has been here for 10, 15 or 20 years were of the view that they never had to confront such a situation,” said Balwinder Singh, who hosts a Punjabi-language call-in radio show from the basement of his home in Brampton.
“They never thought … they would feel unsafe in Canada.”
In the days following the demonstrations, social media was awash in unverified claims about retaliatory violence, government infiltration and police corruption.
CBC News examined the activity of six accounts on X during the first two weeks of November: three belonging to prominent Canadian influencers often critical of the Khalistan movement and three belonging to prominent Canadian advocates of the Khalistani cause.
Using publicly available data, CBC News counted the number of times a given post was reposted by an account that had the characteristics of a bot. The Digital Forensic Research Lab at the D.C.-based Atlantic Council defines a suspicious account as one that posts more than 72 times per day.
This type of analysis does not determine who is controlling the bots or if they are co-ordinating with each other.
The pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample have posted unverified claims about Indian diplomats using places of worship to build a spy network. But there was little evidence these posts were being boosted in a significant way by suspected bots.
The account belonging to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a leading Khalistan advocate, only has 3,600 followers. CBC News detected 13 suspected bots pushing his content in early November; content from the two other pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample was amplified by fewer than 10 bots.
Suspected bot accounts push misinformation
Posts by critics of the Khalistan movement, on the other hand, showed evidence of significant amplification by suspected bots.
Two of the accounts received retweets from more than 1,000 different suspected bots, while the third had more than 500.
Daniel Bordman, a Toronto-based journalist with a right-wing publication called The National Telegraph who has 70,000 followers on X, had the most bot engagement in our sample, receiving nearly 6,000 retweets from nearly 1,800 suspicious accounts when we expanded the analysis to include the whole month of November.
Three men have been arrested after a series of violent demonstrations outside a Hindu temple and Sikh gurdwara in the Toronto area over the weekend. Similar clashes occurred in Surrey, B.C., and come during heightened tensions between Canada and India.
In at least two instances, these suspected bots amplified misleading information posted by Bordman.
On Nov. 13, for example, Bordman posted a video of a gathering in Surrey in which yellow Khalistan flags can be seen.
“Khalistanis march around Surrey BC and claim ‘we are the owners of Canada’ and ‘white people should go back to Europe and Israel,'” Bordman wrote, adding an offensive term and implying Khalistanis shape Canadian foreign policy.
Bordman’s post has received nearly 1.5 million views and 16,000 likes and has been reposted more than 5,000 times. CBC News found that, as of last week, 469 of those reposts were from suspected bot accounts.
Bordman’s post was cited in reports of the incident by NDTV, one of India’s most popular television networks, and by Mint, a Delhi-based financial publication. Other major Indian media outlets covered the incident as well.
But contrary to Bordman’s description, the video shows Sikhs singing hymns during a processional religious ceremony called Nagar Kirtan.
The voice in the original video saying “we are the owners of Canada” and “white people should go back to Europe and Israel” belongs to Inderjit Singh Jaswal, a local vlogger who livestreamed the ceremony.
In a Nov. 17 Instagram post, Jaswal said he is not “Khalistani” and that his statements in the video were directed at people who were making racist comments in the livestream chat.
“Thousands of racist people came there [in the comment section] and were abusing our gods, our culture, our values,” he said in the video, while displaying the racist comments he received during the livestream.
“Why did Daniel [Bordman] hide the comments? I was replying to racist people,” Jaswal says in his video. He posted a separate video in Punjabi offering a similar explanation.
Bordman later appeared on a podcast to discuss Jaswal’s explanation. He ridiculed and mimicked Jaswal’s accent and called him a “mentally deficient Khalistani.”
In another post, boosted by more than 370 suspected bot accounts, Bordman claimed a video of two Surrey police officers performing Gatka, a Sikh martial art, at a religious festival showed “Khalistani cops preparing for the next attack on a Hindu temple in Surrey BC.”
Bordman added: “Can we trust these two to be honest arbitrators of justice?”
A day later, NewsXLive, a pro-Modi news channel based in Delhi, ran a segment about the Surrey video, asking if the officers “can be trusted as impartial enforcers of justice.”
Pro-Modi media has size advantage, Ottawa says
Press freedom in India has dropped significantly since Modi took power in 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
Many of the country’s largest media outlets are owned and operated by Modi loyalists, and their coverage is often sympathetic to the government’s goals, said Reporters Without Borders in a 2023 report.
The size of their audience, which includes diaspora communities, means Modi-aligned outlets have a “distinct advantage in amplifying negative narratives about Canada,” Global Affairs Canada said in a September report.
Bordman has given multiple interviews to Indian media over the past year, including ANI, known for its pro-Modi slant and for spreading misinformation.
In an interview with CBC News, Bordman said some of those media appearances were paid, but he declined to specify which ones.
“I’d never take money from the Indian government,” he said.
Bordman said it was not unexpected that bots would repost some of his content, given the size of his following on X.
“Do some bots retweet me? Sure,” he said. “But I don’t think bots are that significant in the outreach they have.”
‘The new normal’
The presence of artificial social media activity in online discussions of Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada is not novel.
Researchers with the Media Ecosystem Observatory, based at McGill University in Montreal, detected the remnants of a bot farm that issued identical anti-Canada messages in mid-October, just after the RCMP linked agents of the Indian government to homicides and other acts of violence in Canada.
India officially protested on Saturday the Canadian government’s allegation that the country’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah had ordered the targeting of Sikh activists inside Canada, calling it ‘absurd and baseless.’
Read more: cbc.ca/1.7371969.
Earlier this year, the social media company Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) announced it had dismantled a cluster of fake accounts behind a fictitious pro-Sikh activist movement called Operation K.
The company said the network running the accounts was based in China, and that the campaign was directed at Sikhs around the world, including in Canada.
“This is the new normal,” said Aengus Bridgman, who heads the Media Ecosystem Observatory, about the proliferation of bot activity on sites like X.
He said policy-makers and social media users should expect some degree of manipulation “to occur with every issue.”
As Singh wrapped up another broadcast of his radio show Sargam (which means harmony in both Punjab and Hindi), he said he was worried the flow of misinformation is driving a wedge between two communities that once co-existed peacefully.
“A narrative has been created” that aims to make Hindus and Sikhs fear each other, he said.
“I think that is very, very dangerous.”
Published at Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000
Gaza ceasefire could be signed in coming days, source says, as Israeli strikes continue
The United States, joined by Arab mediators, sought on Wednesday to conclude an agreement between Israel and Hamas to halt the 14-month-old war in the Gaza Strip, where medics said Israeli strikes killed at least 20 Palestinians overnight.
A Palestinian official close to the negotiations said on Wednesday that mediators had narrowed gaps on most of the agreement’s clauses. He said Israel had introduced conditions that Hamas rejected but would not elaborate.
On Tuesday, sources close to the talks in Cairo said an agreement could be signed in coming days on a ceasefire and a release of hostages held in Gaza in return for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 people in a house in the northern town of Beit Lahiya while six were killed in separate airstrikes in Gaza City, Nuseirat camp in central areas, and Rafah near the border with Egypt.
In Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, medics said four people were killed in an airstrike on a house. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military spokesman.
Israeli forces have operated in the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya as well as the nearby Jabalia camp since October, in a campaign the military said aimed to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping.
Palestinians accuse Israel of carrying out acts of “ethnic cleansing” to depopulate the northern edge of the enclave to create a buffer zone. Israel denies it.
Hamas does not disclose its casualties, and the Palestinian health ministry does not distinguish in its daily death toll between combatants and non-combatants.
On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it struck a number of Hamas militants planning an imminent attack against Israeli forces operating in Jabalia.
Later on Wednesday, Muhammad Saleh, director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, said Israeli shelling in the vicinity damaged the facility, wounding seven medics and one patient inside the hospital.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
In the Central Gaza camp of Bureij, Palestinian families began leaving some districts after the army posted new evacuation orders on X and in written and audio messages to mobile phones of some of the population there, citing new firing of rockets by Palestinian militants from the area.
Amnesty International has accused the state of Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza war in a new report, an allegation Israel vehemently denied, saying it has respected international law.
Ceasefire gains momentum
The U.S. administration, joined by mediators from Egypt and Qatar, has made intensive efforts in recent days to advance the talks before U.S. President Joe Biden leaves office next month.
In Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog met Adam Boehler, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s designated envoy for hostage affairs. Trump has threatened that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas does not release its hostages by Jan. 20, the day Trump returns to the White House.
CIA Director William Burns was due in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday for talks with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on bridging remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas, other knowledgeable sources said. The CIA declined to comment.
Israeli negotiators were in Doha on Monday looking to bridge gaps between Israel and Hamas on a deal Biden outlined in May.
More than 14 months into the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza is slipping into lawlessness and aid groups say the breakdown is threatening the survivial of up to two million people.
There have been repeated rounds of talks over the past year, all of which have failed, with Israel insisting on retaining a military presence in Gaza and Hamas refusing to release hostages until the troops pulled out.
The war in Gaza, triggered by a Hamas-led attack on communities in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and saw more than 250 abducted as hostages, has sent shockwaves across the Middle East and left Israel isolated internationally.
Israel’s campaign has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, displaced most of the 2.3 million population and reduced much of the coastal enclave to ruins.
Published at Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:50:28 +0000