Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

In September of 2023, The Washington Post wrote of an ongoing coordinated, inauthentic social media coordinated influence operation (CIO) conducted by the Indian Army.[1] The Post argued India’s Modi administration “is setting an example for how authoritarian governments can dictate to American social media platforms what content they must preserve and what they must remove.” Previous reports in 2022 from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute[2] and Stanford’s Internet Observatory[3], both using data supplied to them by Twitter (now X) detailed influence campaigns targeting an Indian domestic audience and working to influence attitudes around Kashmir, Pakistan, and the Indian Army. While these reports did not attribute activity to a specific actor, subsequent disclosures from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety[4] suggest that they held back attribution for fear of the safety of their own employees. The Washington Post report suggested Meta, having attributed content to the Indian Army’s Chinar Corps, similarly held back from making a public attribution and, further, delayed taking action to suspend inauthentic content in violation of Meta’s terms of service.

This report examines ongoing social media influence operations on both Facebook and X for which there is good reason to believe may be a recurrence of the campaign identified and suspended by Twitter in early 2022, a campaign likely linked to the Indian Army’s Chinar Corp. Current accounts engaging in this campaign purport to be from the same places as the previous campaign, use similar pictures and descriptions, and push identical narratives using similar techniques.[5] In addition to examining this pro-Indian activity, this report will also describe ongoing activity from a pro-Pakistani influence operation taking place on X. Together, these campaigns give insight into the propaganda war occurring between these two nuclear armed and contentious neighbors.

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