AstroTurfing hits India

Indian politics discovers the joys of the internet

Undercover "sting" films have their share of problems. They can easily be manipulated to show what the film-makers desire. And they certainly work close to the edge of what is considered ethical journalism, and sometimes go over. That doesn't mean, however, that the issues that they reveal are not sometimes eye-opening. The investigative website Cobrapost, late last week, delivered one such eye-opener with a documentary film that showed an undercover reporter apparently commissioning hit jobs on politicians' popularity on behalf of their electoral rivals. The real, 21st century twist? The hit jobs were mainly online. The film purported to show companies that were willing, for a price, to make clients appear to be more popular online than they actually were. They offered to attack supporters of their client's rivals. They offered to malign the reputation of companies and candidates. And they even took credit for SMS rumours that created communal tension, helping to swing elections in a desired direction.

Here's a word that Indians have some experience of: "AstroTurf". Indians know the word because it helped make success of the national hockey team more difficult; fake grass means that power-play triumphs over deft stick work most times. But "AstroTurf" has another connotation, especially in modern-day politics. Just like AstroTurf is fake grass, an AstroTurfed campaign is one that pretends to be a grassroots campaign but is actually largely synthetic. This has always been a problem in politics - decades ago, allegations of being fake were levelled at many signature campaigns - but in the digital era, it takes on additional salience. In the US and Europe, single-issue interest groups create supposedly independent voices online to push for what they want. Political candidates and movements try to create momentum online through judiciously subcontracting attacks on their rivals. It seems India has caught up.

Some argued in response to the Cobrapost film that fake online support doesn't help. After all, if the Facebook "likes" and the tweets are all fictional, then they don't represent real voters. Or, do they? That ignores the question of political momentum, or the bandwagon effect - the reason every party and candidate in India likes to claim they are on the cusp of a historic landslide victory. Everyone wants to be thought to be in the lead, so that undecided voters flock to the winning team. And that's why they might be willing to pay dubious-looking men in dubious-looking offices sitting in front of flickering monitors, if the men claim that they can get every internet user imagining that the momentum is all in their clients' direction.

The Cobrapost film did also point out that most of the political operatives interviewed claimed to be working for the Bharatiya Janata Party's Narendra Modi. True, Mr Modi's campaign has a presence on social media that is the envy of his rivals. It is harsh, loud and combative, clearly giving the impression that India's middle class has shifted wholesale to Mr Modi's camp. Is that entirely a product of operatives like the ones that Cobrapost interviewed? Perhaps some of it is. But it is equally likely that, as they say, success has many fathers - so complete is the Modi campaign's domination of the online space that everyone will cite it as their achievement when talking to potential clients. True, as anyone who has been online recently can testify, there appears to be a virtual army of tireless Narendra Modi supporters, a crucial adjunct to his campaign of giant rallies and television dominance. But it isn't as if any of them have been revealed as fakes yet - certainly not in the way that it was discovered a few months ago that many of those "liking" Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot's Facebook page were from, apparently, Istanbul, and not Jaipur. Some of Mr Modi's rabid online fans may be imaginary. Others may be from Istanbul. But it's difficult to imagine most of them are.