Bots and Indian TV spread fake news about Canada in wake of Hindu temple clashes

A wave of misinformation about Canadian institutions is being amplified by suspicious bot accounts on social media and by pro-Modi news outlets in India, raising concerns that it could jeopardize Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada.

CBC News reviewed hundreds of posts on X and dozens of hours of footage broadcast on YouTube in the days before and after clashes outside Hindu temples in Surrey, British Columbia, and Brampton, Ontario, in November.

The analysis identified several posts containing misleading and inflammatory comments about the Khalistan movement — which calls for an independent state for Sikhs — and Sikh Canadians in general, which were recirculated through suspicious accounts.

Some of these allegations were then repeated in Indian media sympathetic to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A parallel analysis of pro-Khalistan accounts also revealed several unverified claims, but only marginally amplified by suspected bots.

Even before last month’s clashes, Global Affairs Canada’s media monitoring unit reported that “Modi-aligned” media in India were publishing “often heated” narratives claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was beholden to Khalistani extremists.

Ward Elcock, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said steadfast opposition to the Khalistan movement is part and parcel of the Hindu nationalist ideology promoted by the Modi government at home and abroad.

“The violence of those demonstrations (in Brampton and Surrey) suggests that this agenda has been pushed further in (Canada) than any of us realized,” Elcock said.

Feeling insecure after clashes

Sikh separatists have been demonstrating outside consular events at Hindu temples since Trudeau claimed the Indian government was involved in the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nigar, a prominent Khalistan activist, in Surrey.

These demonstrations, although small in size, are often held near the temple entrance and can carry provocative slogans, such as “Who supports Nagar’s killers: a Hindu temple.”

Last month, demonstrations in Surrey and Brampton were met with counter-demonstrators. A series of confrontations ensued over 48 hours, leading to numerous arrests and convictions of politicians of all stripes.

“Almost everyone who lived here for 10, 15 or 20 years thought they had never had to face such a situation,” said Balwinder Singh, who hosts a Punjabi-language radio show from his basement. In Brampton.

“They never thought…they would feel unsafe in Canada.”

In the days following the demonstrations, social media was awash with unverified claims of retaliatory violence, government infiltration and police corruption.

CBC News examined the activity of six accounts on X during the first two weeks of November: three belonging to prominent Canadian influencers who are often critical of the Khalistan movement and three belonging to prominent Canadian advocates for the Khalistani cause.

Using publicly available data, CBC News counted the number of times a particular post was reshared by an account with bot characteristics. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., defines a suspicious account as one that posts more than 72 times a day.

This type of analysis does not determine who controls the bots or whether they coordinate with each other.

The pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample posted unverified claims about Indian diplomats using places of worship to build a spy network. But there was little evidence that these posts were significantly boosted by suspected bots.

The account belonging to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, one of Khalistan’s most prominent advocates, has only 3,600 followers. CBC News discovered 13 suspected bots pushing content in early November; The content from the other two pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample was amplified by less than 10 bots.

Suspected bot accounts are spreading misinformation

On the other hand, posts by critics of the Khalistan movement showed evidence of significant amplification by suspected bots.

Two of the accounts received retweets from more than 1,000 different suspected bots, while the third account received more than 500.

Daniel Boardman, a Toronto-based journalist who publishes a right-wing newspaper called The National Telegraph and has 70,000 followers on Throughout November.

In at least two cases, these suspected bots amplified misinformation spread by Boardman.

On November 13, for example, Boardman posted a video of a rally in Sari in which yellow Khalistan flags could be seen.

“Khalistanis are demonstrating around Surrey in British Columbia and claiming that we are the owners of Canada, and whites should return to Europe and Israel,” Boardman wrote. An offensive term Khalistanis implicitly shape Canadian foreign policy.

Boardman’s post has received nearly 1.5 million views, 16,000 likes and has been reposted more than 5,000 times. CBC News found that as of last week, 469 of these reposts were from suspected bot accounts.

Boardman’s post was cited in incident reports published by NDTV, one of India’s most popular television networks, and Mint, a Delhi-based financial magazine. Other major Indian media also covered the incident.

But contrary to Boardman’s description, the video shows Sikhs singing hymns during a religious ceremony called Nagar Kirtan.

The voice in the original video saying “We are the owners of Canada” and “White people should go back to Europe and Israel” is credited to Inderjit Singh Jaswal, a local vlogger who live-streamed the ceremony.

In an Instagram post dated November 17, Jaswal said he was not a “Khalistani” and that his statements in the video were directed at people who were making racist comments in the live chat.

“Thousands of racists came there (in the comments section) and were insulting our gods, our culture and our values,” he said in the video, while displaying the racist comments he received during the live broadcast.

“Why did Daniel (Boardman) hide the comments? I was responding to racist people,” Jaswal says in his video. He posted a separate video in Punjabi offering a similar explanation.

Boardman later appeared on the podcast to discuss Jaswal’s interpretation. He mocked and imitated Jaswal’s accent and called him a “retarded Khalistani”.

In another post, backed by more than 370 suspected bot accounts, Boardman claimed that a video of two Surrey police officers performing Jatka, a Sikh martial art, at a religious festival showed “Khalistani cops preparing for the next attack on a Hindu temple in Surrey.” British Columbia. “.

Boardman added: “Can we trust these two to be honest arbiters of justice?”

And after one day, NewsXLiveA Delhi-based pro-Modi news channel aired a segment on Sari’s video, questioning whether the officers “can be trusted as impartial enforcers of justice.”

Ottawa says pro-Modi media have an advantage of scale

Press freedom in India has declined significantly since Modi took power in 2014, according to the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

Many of the country’s largest media outlets are owned and operated by Modi loyalists, and their coverage is often sympathetic to the government’s goals, Reporters Without Borders said in a 2023 report.

The size of its audience, which includes diaspora communities, means media outlets allied with Modi have a “clear advantage in amplifying negative narratives about Canada,” Global Affairs Canada said in a September report.

Boardman has given multiple interviews to Indian media over the past year, including ANI, known for its pro-Modi slant and spreading misinformation.

In an interview with CBC News, Boardman said some of those media appearances were paid, but he declined to specify which ones.

“I will never take money from the Indian government,” he said.

Boardman said it was not unexpected for bots to repost some of his content, given the size of his following on X.

“Are some bots retweeting me? Sure,” he said. “But I don’t think robots matter much in how widespread they are.”

“New normal”

The presence of artificial social media activity in online discussions about Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada is nothing new.

Researchers at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, based at McGill University in Montreal, discovered the remains of a bot farm that issued identical anti-Canadian messages in mid-October, after the RCMP linked Indian government agents to murders and other acts of violence. In Canada.

Earlier this year, social media company Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) Announce It has dismantled a group of fake accounts behind a fake pro-Sikh activist movement called Operation K.

The company said the network running the accounts was based in China, and that the campaign was directed at Sikhs around the world, including Canada.

“This is the new normal,” Angus Bridgman, who heads the Media Ecosystem Observatory, said of the proliferation of bot activity on sites like X.

He said policymakers and social media users should expect some degree of manipulation “that happens with every issue.”

While Singh concluded another broadcast of his radio show For the guard (which means harmony in both Punjabi and Hindi), he said he was concerned that the flow of misinformation was driving a wedge between two communities that had previously coexisted peacefully.

“A narrative has been created” aimed at making Hindus and Sikhs fear each other, he said.

“I think this is very dangerous.”