Spin doctors go into overdrive ahead of polls

With the national election just around the corner, both pro-government and anti-government elements are out to manipulate public opinion through a vigorous campaign on social media platforms and private messaging apps, turning them into hotbeds of spin doctoring, disinformation and fake news.

In September alone, fact checkers identified at least 84 instances of political disinformation, up from 32 in January, according to Dismislab, a fact-checking organisation.

Its findings, based on examination of 2,049 verified fake news, show a surge in disinformation centred around US visa policies and sanctions, with a spike in September.

Instances included the widespread circulation of lists falsely claiming visa bans on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, ministers, advisers, pro-government teachers, and police officers, as well as fabricated statements attributed to the US ambassador asserting visa bans on BNP acting chairman Tarique Rahman and Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, Dismislab found. 

In some cases, when the content was outright fake news, fact checkers were able to intervene and debunk those. But a great number of them are disinformation and they continue to flood the cyberspace to build a narrative to serve vested interests. 

"Disinformation is being used for warfare and it will be used to impact public sentiment in the upcoming elections. The political groups are not spreading fake news unintentionally at all," said Din M Sumon Rahman, professor of Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.

Sumon also runs a fact-checking lab called FactWatch.

Disinformation is different from fake news in that they are spread intentionally, often with a malicious objective. While fake news can also be spread with nasty intents, sometimes they result from honest mistakes and oversights.  

Over the last two months, The Daily Star has examined several hundred posts on dozens of Facebook pages, groups and messaging apps run by some identified, but mostly unidentified, "admins".

Although based on a small sample and is therefore in no way definitive, some patterns have emerged from our findings.

Analysis shows, Awami League sympathisers are running anti-BNP propaganda both by bots (fake profiles created to spread disinformation) as well as traceable individuals or groups on Facebook.

Squeezed between the Digital Security Act and state agencies tasked with weeding out "anti-state" content from social media, the "cyber warriors" of BNP, Jamaat-e-Islami and other opposition parties seem to be reliant on spamming in unnamed Telegram channels and group chats and "foreign influencers".

Some of these pro-opposition foreign influencers are Bangladeshi nationals now living abroad, dishing out disinformation among tens of thousands of followers. 

Many of the social media groups, on all sides, identify themselves as news organisations, and are categorised as "news sites" in Facebook. However, they have no discernible authors or publishers.

Another tactic involves sabotaging the opposition -- by pretending to be from the opposition parties, such as by opening pages bearing names of the opposition party or its leaders, and then disseminating disinformation about the opposition.

Yet another tactic is using a "thirst trap" where a page is created as a fake female profile. An audience base is built by posting photos and videos of women and girls to entice followers. Subsequently, the page switches gears and starts posting the contents they want to disseminate – in this case political disinformation.

Many of these groups cover their tracks and are run by profiles that function like social media bots. It is incredibly difficult to find an actual profile of a person as an admin of these groups.

Some of the telltale ways to recognise a bot include scanty information on the profile, stock photos as profile photos, a plethora of friends of wildly different backgrounds and locked profiles.

PRO-AL CYBER WARRIORS

Between August 28 and 29, a fake video claiming that the former United Nations resident coordinator to Bangladesh made a statement saying how Bangladeshi elections do not need to be held under UN supervision. The video was cross-posted across 39 pages.

Cross-posting is a special Facebook feature that allows uploading of posts on multiple pages from a central content library in a coordinated way.

An analysis of several posts made by these pages show that the same group of Facebook pages like Dhaka Television, Bangladesher Rajniti, Breaking News-Live, Sports 24x7 and several others, cross-post various contents in a coordinated manner.

All these pages are categorised as "news sites" in Facebook.

Dhaka Television, for example, has a website, but there is no contact information, nor any information about its publisher.

It also does not exist on the list of registered television channels in Bangladesh, nor does its corresponding news portal exist on the registration lists of the information ministry. It is also not among the registered IPTVs (internet protocol televisions). The website uses a foreign IP address, of a cloud server based in Singapore, making it impossible to track its local address.

On the night of October 29, a day after the street violence centring on BNP's rally, Dhaka Television, Breaking News-Live, Bangladesher Rajneeti and News Update posted a video titled "Daily Star out to save BNP criminals" all within two minutes -- between 10:29pm and 10:31pm.

The video seeks to discredit a news report by The Daily Star interviewing the driver who said on the record that two men wearing "police vests" set a bus on fire on Malibagh flyover in the capital.

Police later analysed CCTV footage and arrested one alleged imposter who was wearing a bullet-proof jacket with "Press" written on it. The driver only identified the bullet-proof jacket as a police vest.

Dhaka Television is the owner of the video, while the other three cross-posted it. After the initial post, the page of Dhaka Television then posted this video in at least 23 Facebook groups before midnight that day, a Facebook search shows.

In the last one year, Dhaka Television paid $800 for ads across four pages including its own, according to Facebook's Ad Library.

Out of the dozens of groups examined by this newspaper, only three real people stood out as admins or moderators.

One of them is a member of Awami League's relief and social welfare subcommittee Ariful Islam Arif, also a member of Young Bangla, the youth platform of the ruling party's Centre for Research and Information (CRI)

Arif, who is the admin of at least five groups, said, "Not all the pages are run by the party."

Another prominent admin is Mahmud Bin Sajid, a graduate student at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University.

"We have around 300 groups that we use to run our campaign. We spread news about the development work of the government, and tackle fake news spread by the opposition," said Sajid, who is the admin of at least 12 groups that this newspaper scanned.

Called "The Drill," the ruling party's web team provides training on how to evade blocking and removals, and how to "evade" the "trap of fact-checking", shows a post made on September 25, seeking recruits for a workshop on "Facebook Blocking/Restrictions".

Sajid said he has been through "The Drill." 

PRO-OPPOSITION CYBER WARRIORS 

On October 29, the day after its Nayapaltan rally, BNP's social media wings made two photo cards, claiming former journalist leader Rafiq Bhuiyan died after police hit him with teargas.

In actuality, he died after falling off the rickshaw while going to the Jatiya Press Club.

The photo cards were shared by 13 pro-BNP pages, including its official handle "BNP Media Cell". At least six of them were orchestrated together, sharing the cards within minutes of each other.

The photo cards did incredibly well on social media, with BNP media cell's post getting nine times more traction than the other posts on its page on that occasion.

The rumour travelled fast. Last Sunday, Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, a Washington-based advocacy centre on human rights, shared a statement claiming that Bhuiyan was killed by the police.

Facebook's Ad library shows that BNP's official two pages spent $19,531 on political ads over the last one year. 

Asked, BNP media cell's member and head of BNP's press wing Shairul Kabir said, "We are not into any propaganda. We only broadcast the activities of BNP. We are also not running any social media campaign."

A few hours after the BNP grand rally, Basherkella, the oldest pro-Islamist social media group in the country posted a short video on X, formerly twitter, showing two men lying on the street among rubbles, purportedly victims of the BNP grand rally.  

"Heartbreaking scene in #Bangladesh as the bodies of pro-democracy activists are left lying in the streets. These innocent lives were taken in brutal killings by the #Police, ordered by the #DictatorHasina. They were stand up for #VotingRights at an opposition party's grand rally," the post read in English.

In a separate message made in their Telegram channels, the platform asked everyone to retweet the content.

To cover the October 28 rally, The Daily Star fielded nine reporters and five photojournalists. Other media houses deployed their own reporters and camerapersons, a few hundreds of them. None of them, including the 14 journalists of this newspaper, reported seeing any such bodies anywhere.

Basherkella did not respond to our request for comment.

An analysis of some pro-BNP Facebook pages that are used to spread anti-government sentiments, disinformation and rumours shows that many of their admins are located abroad.

On the other hand, the admins of some 50 pro-AL pages that we examined are almost all located in Bangladesh, show Facebook's transparency features.

GOVT INTERCEPTION

Since 2017, Bangladesh has been using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) method to gather publicly available information and to act accordingly.

Through this method, National Telecommunications Monitoring Centre carries out "social media interception" as part of its cyberspace monitoring. It also uses a content blocking and filtering system to counter anti-state content, according to its latest quarterly report.

Over the last three months, the Cyber and Special Crime Division of police shut down operations of at least 700 pages, IDs, and social media groups for spreading rumours.

"Vested quarters are trying to spread rumours and propaganda to portray Bangladesh as a dysfunctional state ahead of the national election. Rab's monitoring cell is constantly working on it," said Commander Khandaker Al Moin, director of the legal and media wing of Rab.

However, law enforcers cannot take down any social media content posted from outside the country.

"They cannot be brought back for legal reasons so they are constantly spreading disinformation," said Md Najmul Islam, additional deputy commissioner of the CTTC's cyber crime unit.

Law enforcement officials will not say it openly, but social media analysts say the government agencies predominantly target anti-government actors. 

Election Commission officials say they are aware of the disinformation campaign on social media ahead of the election.

In August, Facebook and TikTok officials sat with EC officials to discuss the matter.

"We discussed how to prevent propaganda that spreads via Facebook, especially hate speech and communal speech, and disinformation. We also discussed how these will be deleted, removed, and blocked," EC Additional Secretary Ashok Kumar Debnath said about their meeting with Facebook.