Bots and Indian TV push fake news about Canada in wake of Hindu temple clashes

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.

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.

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

Unpacking Trump’s latest broadside about Canada as a ’51st state’

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday once again posted favourably about Canada becoming the 51st state, calling it a “great idea.”

“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense! Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State,” he posted on Truth Social. “They would save massively on taxes and military protection.”

Trump has made a series of statements and social media posts since his Nov. 5 election win mocking Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, previously referring him to as “governor” of the 51st state.

Earlier this week, Trump reacted to the stunning resignation of Chrystia Freeland from cabinet, calling her “toxic.”

Freeland was intensively involved in trade talks with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during Trump’s first term. The pair, along with a top Mexican official, signed the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, in 2019, updating the previous North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Trump has threatened that when he becomes president next month he will impose massive tariffs on all goods from Canada unless it stops the flow of migrants and illegal drugs into the U.S.

Repeating an old trade-deficit claim?

While some suggest Trump is just engaged in trolling, others suggest the threat is an effective political tactic.

“It’s to dominate and intimidate, he’s been very successful at using those strategies, and typical politicians don’t usually know how to respond,” Jennifer Mercieca, Texas A&M communications professor and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, told CBC News recently.

Mercieca said Trump’s humour has the consequence of creating an “in group and out group,” putting people into different divisions.

It’s not specifically clear where the $100,000,000 came from that Trump is quoting, though it appears he is repeating a figure that is seven years old.

The Washington Post reported at the time that it appeared to come from Lighthizer misinterpreting a Statistics Canada data that revealed a $98-billion merchandise trade deficit. The figure did not take into account trade in services.

Trump has long been chagrined by U.S. trade deficits with other countries, though some economists argue that a trade deficit alone does not offer a full accounting of the health of an economy.

“A larger trade deficit can be the result of a stronger economy, as consumers spend and import more while higher interest rates make foreign investors more eager to place their money in the United States,” said the think-tank Council on Foreign Relations in a 2019 report.

Canada’s defence spending under scrutiny

Previous U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama urged NATO alliance members to bolster domestic defence spending, and in 2014, NATO members agreed to commit two per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to defence spending over the subsequent decade. At the time, Canada was spending only 0.9 percent of its GDP on defence.

Trump in his first presidential campaign and subsequent term in office has railed at alliance members and incorrectly stated they are “delinquent” in spending.

It is now estimated that Canada’s military spending is between 1.3 and 1.4 per cent of its GDP.

This summer, Trudeau told a meeting of parliamentarians from NATO nations that Canada is on track to meet its commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence by 2032, a pledge that has been met coolly in the U.S.

Canada and other countries should hit the NATO-imposed target of spending two per cent of GDP “as rapidly as humanly possible,” U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, while Republican congressman Jim Risch of Idaho last month suggested that Trump would let out a “very large guffaw” at Canada’s current timeline.

Canada’s federal Defence Minister Bill Blair said in recent weeks he was “ready to go faster,” and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte earlier this month issued a clarion call to alliance members to increase their defence spending to a “lot more than two per cent.” Alliance members need to be on a “wartime footing” with their defence spending, he said.

Some analysts have said the flat metric can provide an incomplete picture of a country’s military status and its research and development and other capabilities.

“Spending at two per cent says very little about a country’s actual military capabilities; its readiness, deployability, and
sustainability levels; and the quality of the force that it can field,” the think-tank Carnegie Europe said in a 2015 report. “It also is mum about a country’s willingness to deploy forces and take risks once those forces are deployed. It does not assess whether a country spends its limited resources wisely.”

Blair said at a Canada Global Affairs Institute conference in Ottawa last month that he is asking for help from the U.S. because much of what the Canadian Armed Forces has to acquire comes from American corporations and defence contractors.

Canadians cool to being 51st

A recent Leger poll suggests 13 per cent of Canadians would like the country to become the next U.S. state. The demographic breakdowns show there’s higher support among men, at 19 per cent, compared with only seven per cent of women.

Conservative party supporters came in at 21 per cent, while one in 10 Liberal voters said they were in favour of the idea. The People’s Party of Canada showed the highest level of endorsement among the federal parties, at 25 per cent, while the NDP was the lowest, at six per cent.

Among the overall population, 82 per cent opposed the idea, the highest of which comes from Atlantic provinces, women and Canadians over the age of 55. Leger polled 1,520 people between Dec. 6 and Dec. 9. The poll does not have a margin of error because online polls aren’t considered truly random samples.

It’s not a question Canadians have often been surveyed on, though it has happened in the past.

A Gallup poll in 1990 around the time of heated Meech Lake accord negotiations revealed that just 13 per cent of those surveyed would support the idea of their province joining the United States, with 79 per cent opposed.

In 1964, Maclean’s ran a special issue covering U.S.-Canada relations. In a poll commissioned by the magazine and a few other Canadian media outlets, including the CBC program Inquiry, 17 per cent favoured a union of Canada and the U.S., and 12 per cent more strongly favoured a union.

Canadians sounded off on the prospect of becoming part of the United States on the most recent episode of CBC’s Cross Country Checkup.

You can listen to what listeners had to say here:

Published at Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:12:41 +0000