The Fake News Bust That Got 7,000 Retweets

2014 elections saw the BJP crush the opposition. They were techno savvy, they used social media weapons. From Twitter to WhatsApp, the online battlefield in India was exposed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the big question has been whether people not associated with a party tweet on behalf of senior BJP members to create a narrative in a coordinated manner. The nightmare of any coordinated Twitter campaign unfolded on social media on Wednesday after a shared document used by the party's members was mischievously edited by someone, triggering a deluge of tweets criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. According to series of tweets by Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt-News, the Google Doc circulated by the BJP's IT cell, which frames and circulates messages that are then posted by a host of handles including Union Ministers, was modified by someone. In this segment of Breaking the Fake news, we speak to the person who found the loophole in the BJP IT-cell.