ISLAMABAD: A dead professor and numerous defunct organisations wereresurrected and used alongside at least 750 fake media outlets in a vast15-year global disinformation campaign to serve Indian interests, a newinvestigation has revealed. The man whose identity was stolen was regardedas one of the founding fathers of international human rights law, who diedaged 92 in 2006.
“It is the largest network we have exposed,” said Alexandre Alaphilippe,executive director of EU DisinfoLab, which undertook the investigation andpublished an extensive report on Wednesday, BBC reported.
The network was designed primarily to “discredit Pakistan internationally”and influence decision-making at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) andEuropean Parliament, EU DisinfoLab said. EU DisinfoLab partially exposedthe network last year but now says the operation is much larger and moreresilient than it first suspected.
The network relies heavily on amplifying content produced on fake mediaoutlets with the help of Asian News International (ANI) – India’s largestwire service, and a key focus of the investigation.
The EU DisinfoLab researchers, who are based in Brussels, believe thenetwork’s purpose is to disseminate propaganda against India’s neighbourand rival Pakistan. Last year, the researchers uncovered 265 pro-Indiansites operating across 65 countries, and traced them back to a Delhi-basedIndian holding company, the Srivastava Group (SG).
Wednesday’s report, titled Indian Chronicles, reveals that the operation,run by SG, is spread over at least 116 countries and has targeted membersof the European Parliament and the United Nations – raising questions abouthow much EU and UN staff knew about SG’s activities, and whether they couldhave done more to counter those activities, especially after last year’sreport.
Alaphilippe said the EU DisinfoLab researchers had never encountered suchco-ordination between different stakeholders to spread disinformation.”During the last 15 years, and even after being exposed last year, the factthat this network managed to operate so effectively shows thesophistication and the drive of the actors behind Indian Chronicles,” hesaid.
“You need more than a few computers to plan and sustain such an action,” hesaid. Ben Nimmo, a disinformation network expert, said the uncoverednetwork was “one of the most persistent and complex operations” he hadseen, but he too was wary of attributing it to a specific actor.
Nimmo, who is director of investigations at digital monitoring firmGraphika, cited previous examples of privately-run large-scale trolloperations. “Just because they’re big, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’redirectly run by the state.