“organized army of far-right trolls” which belongs to the BJP (Mackintosh & Gupta, 2020). Amnesty International (2020) conducted research into online harassment and found that one in every seven tweets mentioning women politicians in India was ‘problematic’ or ‘abusive,’ and that one in every five problematic tweets was sexist or misogynistic. While both parties deny supporting online trolls, these accounts are often aligned with party agendas and the leaders provide tacit support. For example, Prime Minister Modi follows known troll accounts on Twitter, and drew criticism for hosting one hundred and fifty social media influencers at his residence in 2015, many of whom used sexual slurs to harass women online (Safi, 2018). Manipulated Content Doctored photos and videos circulate widely on social media, as both a means of political persuasion and to attack opponents. This is particularly concerning as senior politicians often share these images from personal accounts. For example, an edited video purported to show INC leader for East Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi teaching children abusive political slogans was shared by Smriti Irani, a serving cabinet minister for the BJP. However, the full unedited video reveals that Gandhi can be seen telling the children to stop using abusive language (@DFRLab, 2019). Similarly, Divya Spandana, director of social media and communications for the INC, shared a doctored photo of Prime Minister Modi that drew a comparison with Adolf Hitler (Sidharth, 2019). A significant technological development has been the first use of a deepfake video as part of an Indian election campaign. Ahead of the legislative assembly elections in Delhi, on 7 February 2020, two deepfake videos of BJP President Manoj Tiwari criticising the Delhi government were circulated on WhatsApp (Christopher, 2020). This was organised by the Delhi BJP IT Cell and political communications firm The Ideaz Factory. It utilised deepfake technology to create a video in which the politician speaks a local Hindi dialect—Haryanvi. Concerns about the manipulative potential for deepfakes have grown, but this particular application of deepfakes is part of a campaign to reach different linguistic voter bases. Neelkant Bakshi, of the BJP Delhi IT cell, said the deepfakes were distributed to 5,800 WhatsApp groups in Delhi, reaching fifteen million people (Christopher, 2020). Deepfakes have previously been used for manipulated pornographic content. India’s youngest parliamentarian, Chandrani Murmu, was subject to her face being superimposed onto an obscene video ahead of her election in 2019 (Mackintosh & Gupta, 2020). Table 2: Observed Strategies, Tools and Techniques of Social Media Manipulation in India Account Types Messaging and Valence Content and Platforms Communication Strategies Human, Fake, Automated Facebook pages & ads, Facebook, disinformation & Instagram, Twitter, misinformation websites, WhatsApp, NaMo memes, doctored videos, WhatsApp groups, deepfakes, amplification Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. 180 Pro-Party Messages, Attacks on Opposition, Polarization Strategies, Trolling and Harassment