most shared posts between September and November 2018 were inaccurate or misleading, exposing its two million followers to misinformation (S. P. and S. Bansal, 2019). Alt News discovered The India Eye had links with Silver Touch, the private firm linked to fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It is also claimed that Silver Touch created the NaMo app itself (Patel & Chaudhuri, 2019).The India Eye’s Facebook page was taken down by Facebook and is part of a wider propaganda network linked to Silver Touch (Gleicher, 2019). Organizational Capacity and Resources Networks of paid workers and volunteers disseminate disinformation across social media, responding in real time to political developments. The organization of propaganda efforts appears to be both centrally coordinated and volunteer-run. India’s vast size and regional politics means that propaganda efforts are geographically coordinated. There is evidence of specific regional cells, such as the Gujarat Congress IT cell’s ‘Cyber Army’ (@DFRLab, 2019), the BJP Delhi IT cell, and the BJP’s fifty-member team in an office in Bangalore (Niranjankumar, 2018). A former troll said that he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones as part of a three hundred-person team in a BJP IT cell (Riley et al., 2018). Alongside paid workers, individuals can volunteer to assist in ‘WhatsApp Group Management’, being ‘active on Facebook & Twitter’ or ‘Content Creation’ among others, according to a volunteer sign-up form (Niranjankumar, 2018). There is a blurring of attribution between paid IT cell workers and volunteer movements. The former head of the BJP IT cell, Arvind Gupta, said in 2016 that neither the party nor IT cell had ever encouraged trolling and that online support came from a grass-roots movement (Riley et al., 2018). Relying on volunteers and paid workers allows the blurring of boundaries between campaigning, trolling and propaganda. Political parties used Facebook to target political advertisements at voters. Following the takedown of fake accounts in April 2019, according to Facebook the INC-linked accounts spent US$39,000, and the BJP-linked accounts spent US$70,000 from 2014 to 2019 in political advertisements (Gleicher, 2019). However, since 21 February 2019, when Facebook began to track political advertising, the total spending for political advertisements in India totalled 103 million rupees, approximately US$1.5 million (Goel & Frenkel, 2019). There is a lack of transparency on who is amplifying political advertisements; while the top three advertisers in India were all aligned with the BJP’s election agenda, none explicitly disclose their affiliation. Table 3: Cyber Troop Capacity in India Team Size Resources Spent Activity Levels (USD) Coordination Capacity Measure Multiple teams ranging in size from 50-300 people $1.5 million on political Permanent, Increases Medium levels of Mediumadvertisements. around political events coordination between High Contracts with several (e.g. elections) cyber troops. firms for unknown Geographically amounts. organized. Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Government and Private Responses There have been several public and private initiatives designed to curb the spread of lowquality information online. Fact-checking has been an important response and several media organizations, such as BOOM (Boom Live) and Alt News, have been established to verify 182

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