00:00 Clip Audio - Go back home Modi!

00:05 Paul Brandus - Protesters outside the White House in late June, they were opponents of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was meeting with President Biden. India, the United Nations says, has passed China and is now the world's most populous country. India has also been long known as the world's biggest democracy. But the protesters in Lafayette Square said that under Modi's nine-year tenure, India is anything but a democracy. Indeed, Modi has been accused of overseeing a backslide in political, religious, and press freedoms. Along with that has been an effort, some critics say, by his BJP, the ruling party in India, to flood Indian media with a torrent of false narratives designed to favor him and his policies and to undermine opponents. There is, of course, another word for these alleged false narratives, disinformation. I'm Paul Brandus and that's the name of this series Disinformation. I'll be joined as usual by Meredith Wilson, the CEO of Emergent Risk International, who will share her insights into this
crucial topic. At a news conference with President Biden during his White House visit, Modi was asked about his government's commitment to free and fair speech.

01:20 Clip audio Mr. Prime Minister, India has long pried itself as the world's largest democracy, but there are many human rights groups who say that your government has discriminated against religious minorities and sought to silence its critics. As you stand here in the East Room of the White House, where so many world leaders have made commitments to protecting democracy, what steps are you and your government willing to take to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?

02:09 Clip audio (translator) I'm actually really surprised that people say so and so. People don't say it. Indeed, India is a democracy. And as President Biden also mentioned, India and America, both countries, democracy is in our DNA. Democracy is our spirit. Democracy runs in our veins.
We live democracy.

02:39 Paul Brandus And yet for a country that, to use the Prime Minister's phrase, lives democracy, there are deep problems. This year, out of 180 countries, India ranked 161st near the bottom in the World Press Freedom Index, put out each year by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization. ranking is a sharp fall from the year before, when India ranked 142nd. In fact, on the Reporters Without Borders website, India shows up on the map in a deep dark red, along with the likes of Russia, which is 164th, China and Saudi Arabia, countries not exactly known for their openness and democratic values. Quick sidebar, by the way, the United States has only ranked 45th, reports as quote, structural barriers to press freedom persisting this country once considered a model for freedom of expression. But I digress. But India 161st, let's take a deeper look and also ask this question, how does disinformation play a role?

03:55 Meredith Wilson So if you look across the board at freedom of information rankings, you will see that most free countries have dropped in the ratings, including the United States. However, India is an extreme example. And a lot of that has come with the governing party being this very Hindu nationalist government. It's an extreme version of something that's been going on there forever, which is pitting ethnic groups against each other and particularly Hindus and Muslims against each other in politics.

04:34 Paul Brandus Meredith Wilson notes that this is nothing new in India, but what is new is the rise in power of social media, which has made all this even worse.

04:45 Meredith Wilson I think the combination of social media, the internet in general, things like WhatsApp and this party coming to power and the manipulation of all of these things for political power has made it substantially worse than it previously was. So is it just the ruling party? Absolutely not. But you have an information cycle too in India that is trying to think of a nice way to say this, but it's like a hyper cycle. There is just this constant feed of information going around and going around and going around. So it creates this sort of feedback loop of disinformation that's happening all the time there.

05:32 Paul Brandus Let me repeat the last line of Meredith's comment, quote, it creates this sort of feedback loop of disinformation that's happening all the time there, unquote. Pearl D'Souza, who is Indian and an analyst for Emergent Risk International, thinks that while mis and disinformation has always existed in India, it has risen to new and disturbing levels since Modi came to power in 2014.

05:56 Pearl D'Souza It is a huge problem and it's actually only been increasing. So it's not that it didn't exist before 2014, but since then it's become much bigger and it seems to have taken over all spaces of media, so social media, the press, print media, all of it. So it is a big problem, especially if, like you said, we call ourselves one of the biggest democracies and for a functioning democracy that has become an extremely significant problem.

06:39 Paul Brandus Well, how has this been able to happen? I mean, it's an open raucous media, privately owned television, radio, privately owned newspapers and so forth. How has it been able to grow so quickly? I mean, what's going on?

06:52 Pearl D'Souza Well, yes, privately owned, but like one of the news channel that was recently launched, the owner of that channel put it privately owned by far, fair and impartial, but with intelligent support to the popular ruling party. So he did say we are by and large impartial, but we provide popular, intelligent support to the ruling party. So what that means is really it is privately owned, but it is privately owned by friends, allies, people associated with the ruling party. And that has increasingly become the case in India. So even the few organizations that were not associated with the government somehow or that dared to question the government, they've seen their offices raided. They've seen income tax or enforcement direct rate searches and investigations against them. And just the level of harassment that is, there's been like a really, really high level of harassment. So that shrinking space for free press, even though it is privately owned, but it is privately owned by people who are either supporting the ruling party or supporting a political party in the country. That bit has increased.

08:25 Paul Brandus Alleged harassment, raiding offices, unleashing the Indian equivalent of IRS on media organizations. This is nasty stuff. I'd like to note that I reached out to the Indian ambassador to the US, the top representative of Prime Minister Modi here in Washington, but the ambassador, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, did not respond.

08:49 Clip audio (BBC News) Good afternoon. India's coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen by the day, and now it's hit a grim new milestone. The country has become the first in the world to record more than 400,000 coronavirus infections. That's in just one day.

09:04 Paul Brandus Meantime, as that BBC report noted, the COVID pandemic devastated India. Ask yourself whether it's a coincidence that India just happened to lead the world in COVID misinformation. That's according to a study by Canada's University of Alberta. The study, using data compiled by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a respected non-profit organization that's working to reduce the prevalence of global misinformation, said that more false narratives about the pandemic originated in India than any other country. The US and Brazil were next, or whenever that's worth. I mentioned before that false narratives are nothing new in India, but it's demonstrably worse now. Again, here's Meredith Wilson.

09:50 Meredith Wilson If you look across the board at Freedom of Information rankings, you will see that most free countries have dropped in the ratings, including the United States. However, India is an extreme example. Some of that, a lot of that has come with the governing party being this very Hindu nationalist government. It's an extreme version of something that's been going on there forever, which is pitting ethnic groups against each other, and particularly Hindus and Muslims against each other in politics. You can go back the last 100 years and you can see that this is something that's been happening forever. I think the combination of social media, the internet in general, things like WhatsApp this party coming to power and the manipulation of all of these things for political power has made it substantially worse than it previously was. Is it just the ruling party? Absolutely not. But you have an information cycle too in India that is trying to think of a nice way to say this, but it's like a hyper cycle. There is just this constant feed of information going around and going around and going around. So it creates this sort of feedback loop of disinformation.

11:39 Paul Brandus More on this after this short break.

11:49 Paul Brandus We tend to think of disinformation in terms of serious things like the pandemic, elections and so forth, but in India this sort of maliciousness is getting so ubiquitous that it's even creeped into sports.

12:05 Clip audio (DW News) This looks like a normal cricket match in India, but everything about it is fake. The players, the umpires, the pitch and even the crowd noise. A gang set up fake Indian Premier League matches to dupe foreign bettors. It reached the quarter-final
stage before it was busted by local police.

12:25 Paul Brandus This bizarre story is only the latest example of misinformation making headlines in India. Imagine that gamblers hoodwinked by phony cricket matches talk about creative maliciousness. This is nothing less than financial fraud, another form of disinformation, that report from Germany's Deutsche Welle, by the way. And what about artificial intelligence? One of the key points I keep making in this podcast series is that technology is, at its essence, agnostic. Whether it's used for well or ill depends upon the intent of those using it. To that end, logically, a British tech startup using AI to combat disinformation just conducted a study of generative AI and its potential not just for what it calls misuse but what it calls coordinated misuse. It tested three programs, Mid-Journey, Dolly 2, and Stable Diffusion, to see whether they would accept prompts related to common mis- and disinformation narratives. In India, of the 30 prompts tested, 27, or 90 percent, of the prompts were accepted by those platforms. In other words, it was easy, really easy, to generate disinformation. I ran into Logically's head of research, Kyle Walter, at a recent disinformation conference at Cambridge University in England. India, we spoke, focused specifically on narratives related to kind of religious divisiveness, related to claims, again, of election security.

13:54 Kyle Walters So whether the idea of ballots being stolen or being transported and being lost, things of that nature. We particularly were trying to create divisive narratives when we were putting the prompts in about India. So we were able to generate images, for example, of a Kashmiri militant in front of an Indian National Congress party flag, right? So that type of stuff is something that has previously, in prior Indian elections, been kind of a focus of conversation. So we wanted to see if we could replicate those images or just evidence of those claims using these platforms. You make this sound so easy to do. I mean, that's part of the problem, right? A lot of people have access to these platforms and they're able to use them with somewhat unfettered access. That's why we want to advocate for the additional use of more content moderation and for the ability of people to use them, but just use them in a safe way.

14:45 Paul Brandus And since the 2024 campaign here in America is well underway, it logically also tested those three generative platforms to see if they would also create US-oriented election The results were equally disturbing. Props to generate false narratives were created nine out of every 10 times.

15:11 Kyle Walters Our election, as you know, is just 15 months away. The hope is that early enough warning, so this is what, July of 2023, we've got hopefully a little over a year, obviously, until the election, but the election cycle will start much sooner than then. But the goal here is not to put negative light on these platforms, but to kind of create a hysteria over it, but just to flag the potential that there are gaps that are being missed at the moment, so we can address them early enough to have an actual impact ahead of these elections.

15:37 Paul Brandus Perhaps, but given our election timetable, the speed of these generative technologies, their ease of use, and their rapid adoption rate, it all suggests that doing anything meaningful to reduce the potential for harm and deception seems low. I hate to be pessimistic and hope to be proven wrong. Have a tip, idea, or example of disinformation you'd like us to check out? Contact me, pbrandus at gmail dot com. That's p-b-r-a-n-d-u-s at gmail dot com. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks to Pearl DeSouza and Kyle Walter for their insights. Sound from the BBC and Deutsche Welle. Our sound designer and editor, Noah Fouts. Audio engineer, Nathan Corson. Producer, Michael DeAloia. And Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.