For @EconomicTimes, I dive deep into India's QAnon moment— the 'Justice for Sushant Singh Rajput' movement — on digital media platforms. I went down the rabbit hole to study and understand the crazy conspiratorial thinking that has guided it thus far. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/the-strange-sometimes-sinister-conspiracy-theories-on-sushant-singh-rajputs-death-that-flourished-on-social-media/articleshow/78636570.cms

To understand the depth of how it played out — in terms of absolute numbers and volume, I relied on data from Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned content discovery and social monitoring platform. I had already joined several groups that espoused this cause, to follow the chatter.

Then, YouTube, where a lot of these conversations were happening in more and more detail, often gruesome. With little or no evidence to suggest anything. Needless to say, it was already spreading like wildfires on WhatsApp. But Telegram, played a role in coordination for users.

The groups I was tracking. 78 in all. But could only fit 40-odd here. The data here are the numbers within the last 30 days.

Let’s now look at how these groups grew on Facebook. This is what shocked me the most. Today, there are at least 4.3 million users on these groups — both private and public — that are part of this “movement”. In the first week, they were at 43,900. This is phenomenal.

Full meta in the comments section. Sadly, this is never going to recede. This is probably what people have been reinforced to believe over the last three months, and anything else is far from acceptable.

While there are parallels to QAnon — in terms of the sheer role-play that people do on a daily, if not hourly basis, and that it is well premised around a presumed “injustice”, it differs slightly. It is not violent. YET. And very amateur. But they’ve done well on effort.

Now let’s look at the other things that are dangerous about this. And where Facebook-based “news” pages come in. They use vox-pop as a way to “report” news. So let’s look at some of them. There’s something called Desi TV. Check the chyron/opening page. 2.35M views. 4.3K shares.

Another one: 1.1K shares. I am assuming these are outright fake. Therefore, dangerous.

The bottom line here: Facebook Groups are a problem. But even bigger concern — the lack of enforcement. Something some of us in the media have been barking about for ages.

To act on “user reports” in a group that is largely focused around a cause, where there is group think, and anything else/contrarian take is not welcome and “in good faith” is merely being hopeful. No one in those groups is going to report anything because they believe in it.

Just wait till these groups pivot to something else, if and when this all ends. Vaccines, for instance. Or political dis/misinformation. For now, this has descended into a coordinated “campaign” against “Bollywood”, and the media. No prisoners taken at all. Scattergun & sinister.

Afterthought, but what is also deeply concerning is this business of mass hashtag trending. Not new. Everyone does it etc. In 2020, Twitter “trending” is probably the most useless product feature of them all. The least they could do is give users the choice to toggle on/off.

On Sunday, these SSRians were trying to trend not one, but FOUR hashtags during the day. Some of them made it. Today’s trend for instance, is this. This is coordinated through Telegram (one group has 15k people) + WhatsApp groups, and humans and bots do it together. It’s insane.

The idea is to get these trends to the media’s attention. Gullible YouTube and FB-based news entities, keen on cashing in on these grievances, are happy to amplify it. Plus, there are mainstream news channels who do it too. Some have been at the forefront of it. All languages.

There are additional concerns about the information ecosystem. Specific to flow of information. Which today looks like this —

social media news entities (TV, online sites, sometimes newspapers) social media (clips of debates/monologues going viral) content farms/memes

That a significant population in this country was swayed by (and hooked itself to) coordinated conspiratorial thinking for the last three months, largely originating from users role-playing on social media platforms, and amplified by mainstream media, is a matter of grave concern

I wish this were funny. But this clearly ain’t. There are a bunch of people who have made their careers out of this, and grifting their way through, as I post this tweet.

End of thread.