On November 22, 2023 - just three days before voting day in the Rajasthan assembly elections an inconspicuous Facebook page named Ulta Chashma started running video ads on Instagram showing the gruesome killing of a Hindu tailor by two radical Muslim men in Udaipur the year before.
The Facebook page ran eight such disturbing video ads from November 22 to November 25, 2023 - the day of voting.
The 20-seconds long video also contained text in Hindi which said, ‘before you vote, remember the last screams of Udaipur Hindu Kanhaiyalal’.
(‘Vote dene se pehle yaad rakhe Udaipur ke Hindu Kanhaiyalal ki akhiri cheekhe’)
Kanhaiya Lal - a Hindu tailor in Udaipur, Rajasthan was hacked to death on June 28, 2022 by two Muslim radicals who captured the blood curdling crime on camera and circulated the video.
The inflammatory ads are just one part of a multi-pronged divisive social media strategy run by the page Ulta Chashma, which also employs hate speech, misinformation and propaganda to target the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s political rivals, an investigation by BOOM found.
BOOM also found the network sharing misinformation targeting protesting farmers demanding a minimum support price. The network also peddled hate speech demonising Muslims in India.
The prolific network has spent over two crore rupees promoting over a thousand ads on Meta-owned platforms, in a short span of four months since it went live in the first week of November last year.
As India counts down to a general election in April-May, political parties and their proxies are looking to weaponise misinformation in this high stakes battle.
"I think a lot of us will agree that the fact that you have opaque operations like this running close to elections is problematic in itself," Prateek Waghre, executive director at the digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation told BOOM.
"The challenge becomes quantifying. Okay, what is the scale of money that is being exchanged through these processes? How wide are these operations? You have identified one page, there’s likely to be a much larger network and parallel networks doing similar things. And that sort of where it becomes hard to determine the scale of the issue," Waghre said.
Ulta Chashma - A Shadow Political Social Media Campaign
The Facebook page Ulta Chashma was created on November 6, 2023 and includes a network of six other pages and corresponding Instagram accounts including two miscellaneous political satire pages named MemeXpress and Political X-ray.
The four pages targeting opposition ruled states are Sonar Bangla aimed at the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, Tamilakam aimed at Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) ruled Tamil Nadu, Kannada Sangamam aimed at Congress-ruled Karnataka and Malabar Central targeting the Left Democratic Front in Kerala.
On Facebook, these pages describe themselves as a ‘Digital creator’ with no hint of any link to a political campaign.
However, the network’s enormous spending on ads betray their benign appearance. The network had spent ₹24,701,992 on ads on Meta's platforms, at the time of publishing this article.
The content includes slickly produced videos, memes, comics, and posts containing multiple hashtags which are intended for the target audience.
The pages have launched acerbic attacks on opposition leaders such as Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, MK Stalin, Tejashwi Yadav etc.
“This is something we certainly see around the world. In the US, memes ridiculing Joe Biden’s age are infamous already now – several months before the presidential election,” Inga Trauthig, head of research of the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, told BOOM.
“Satire is a useful tactic to influence people without being too confrontational. Instead of targeting an opponent more directly in a message by criticizing their economic policies, campaigners draft a meme of people counting their pennies with a snarky text accompanying it, for example,” Trauthig said.
“This way they get across the same message but are less aggressive and even have some plausible deniability, along the lines of ‘it’s just a meme, we did not mean to target xyz,” she added.
Ulta Chashma Peddled Misinformation Around The Farmers’ Protest
On February 27, Ulta Chashma’s Instagram account posted a video showing a group of Sikh men tying a turban for a Muslim man who can be seen removing his skull cap in the video.
The cryptic text on the video took a potshot at Muslims saying, ‘so these people are running the protest’ referring to the ongoing farmers' protest taking place at the outskirts of Delhi. It also used hashtags related to the farmers' protest.
However, a fact-check revealed that the video was shot in June 2022 and showed a turban tying camp before the funeral of popular Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moosewala who was gunned down by gangsters.
Similarly, the Instagram handle also posted a video of a fight between a group of Sikh men over the sale of a tractor at the Barnala tractor mandi (market) in Punjab and falsely claimed it showed protesters fighting over payment to take part in the protests. Read BOOM's fact-check on it here.
Most of these false claims targeting the farmers’ protest originated from verified right-wing X accounts and then made their way to other social media platforms.
The handle also posted a 2023 video from Canada which showed supporters of Khalistan - a separatist movement for a Sikh homeland, playing with a football that was wrapped in the Indian national flag, and linked it to the farmers’ protest. Read BOOM's fact-check here.
In another instance it shared a video calling the protesters nakli kisan or fake farmers and alleged that the protesters were Khalistan sympathisers.
BOOM found Ulta Chashma’s Instagram account posted several videos with false claims linking it to the 2024 farmers’ protest.
Facebook Ads Demonised Indian Muslims
Ulta Chashma also promoted posts that peddled hate speech targeting Indian Muslims. In Rajasthan, it promoted a post with an image showing two stick figures, one wearing a skull cap generally associated with Muslim men, and brandishing a sword while chasing the other figure. The ‘assailant’ also had an erection.
The post was captioned in Hindi as ‘Rajasthan beware’ and used hashtags mentioning the assembly elections in the state and then Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and the state's then Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot.
Meta removed the post after we flagged it to the platform. “We have enforced against the content for violating our Community Standards” - a spokesperson for Meta said.
Network Portrayed Modi Government In A Positive Light
BOOM found that the only positive content posted by these pages were to paint the Narendra Modi-led government and the BJP in a positive light.
For instance former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar’s highly publicised visit to Jammu & Kashmir with his family in February was used by Ulta Chashma in a post to show normalcy in the region.
An old video of stone pelting in the valley was juxtaposed with that of Tendulkar playing cricket with locals in Gulmarg, Kashmir as two Indian Army soldiers carrying guns were seen standing close by.
The text of the post in Hindi translates to, ‘the change seen from removing the development opposed article’ referring to the Modi government’s abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.
One of the pages in the same network named Malabar Central posted a video montage of Modi’s rally in Kerala and included vox pop of BJP supporters praising the prime minister.
Ulta Chashmaa was listed as the advertiser paying for promoting the post.
Political X-ray, one of the pages in the network, posted a cartoon showing Maharashtra Chief Minister and leader of the breakaway Shiv Sena faction Eknath Shinde driving a bulldozer and a sign that said Mira Road - a Mumbai suburb that witnessed communal unrest in January this year.
When rumours of notorious gangster Dawood Ibrahim being poisoned by unknown men started spreading on X in December last year, the page Ulta Chashma ran a meme ad on Instagram depicting Kannada actor Yash as ‘The Unknown’ beating up the bad guys - Dawood Ibrahim and Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Canada accused India last year of orchestrating the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on its soil, a charge which New Delhi has rubbished and which led to the breakdown of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
‘Unknown men’ is an inside joke among the Indian right-wing who see the killings as a sign of India’s growing stature in the world capable of eliminating its enemies who flee abroad.
Surrogate Political Campaigns Are Hiding In Plain Sight
The Ad Library was created in the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to improve transparency around ads, particularly political ads, on Meta's platforms.
Advertisers that run political ads, or ads about social issues or elections need to complete Meta’s ad authorisation process, as per the platform’s guidelines.
These ads must also have a disclaimer with the name and the entity that paid for the ads.
However, political parties and by extension political consultancy firms that are hired by them have devised an ingenious solution allowing them to hide in plain sight.
Political campaigns list hard-to-trace phone numbers, give vague addresses and create a placeholder websites in the same name as that of the page, thus creating an elaborate maze.
For instance Ulta Chashma has listed its address as just Chatarpura, Rajasthan, in the ad disclaimer field. Chatarpura is a village located in Sanganer Tehsil of Jaipur district.
An average Facebook or Instagram user cannot discern who is behind a surrogate ad page or account even if they look up the page/handle in the ad library.
Internet Freedom Foundation's Prateek Waghre said, “It’s going to be an adversarial space. These kinds of operators are always going to try and find ways to evade. The question is how easy is that for them to do.”
“It is of course going to be operationally intensive for Meta to be able to catch a lot of these things but it certainly does seem like they should be able to catch these sorts of things where there isn’t a specific address. It does seem Meta will have the resources at its disposal to at least getting closer to catching more of these. Now again, it’s never going to be a hundred percent (but) it certainly shouldn’t be easy to evade Meta’s checks and balances.”