NEW DELHI: Bollywood stars seldom weigh in on politics, so videos showing two celebrities criticizing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — and endorsing his main opposition, the Congress party — were bound to go viral.
But the clips of A-list actors Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh were fake, AI-generated videos that were yet another example of the false or misleading claims swirling online with the goal of influencing India’s election. Both actors filed complaints with police but such actions do little to stanch the flow of such misinformation.
Claims circulating online in India recently have misstated details about casting a ballot, claimed without evidence that the election will be rigged, and called for violence against India’s Muslims.
Researchers who track misinformation and hate speech in India say tech companies’ poor enforcement of their own policies has created perfect conditions for harmful content that could distort public opinion, spur violence and leave millions of voters wondering what to believe.
“A non-discerning user or regular user has no idea whether it’s someone, an individual sharing his or her thoughts on the other end, or is it a bot?” Rekha Singh, a 49-year-old voter, told The Associated Press. Singh said she worries that social media algorithms distort voters’ view of reality. “So you are biased without even realizing it,” she said.
In a year crowded with big elections, the sprawling vote in India stands out. The world’s most populous country boasts dozens of languages, the greatest number of WhatsApp users as well as the largest number of YouTube subscribers. Nearly 1 billion voters are eligible to cast a ballot in the election, which runs into June.
Tech companies like Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, say they are working to combat deceptive or hateful content while helping voters find reliable sources. But researchers who have long tracked disinformation in India say their promises ring hollow after years of failed enforcement and “cookie-cutter” approaches that fail to account for India’s linguistic, religious, geographic and cultural diversity.
Given India’s size and its importance for social media companies, you might expect more of a focus, say disinformation researchers who focus on India.
“The platforms are earning money off of this. They are benefiting from it, and the whole country is paying the price,” said Ritumbra Manuvie a law professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Manuvie is a leader of The London Story, an Indian diaspora group which last month organized a protest outside Meta’s London offices.
Research by the group and another organization, India Civil Watch International, found that Meta allowed political advertisements and posts that contained anti-Muslim hate speech, Hindu nationalist narratives, misogynistic posts about female candidates as well as ads encouraging violence against political opponents.
The ads were seen more than 65 million times over 90 days earlier this year. Together they cost more than $1 million.
Meta defends its work on global elections and disputed the findings of the research on India, noting that it has expanded its work with independent fact-checking organizations ahead of the election, and has employees around the world ready to act in case its platforms are misused to spread misinformation. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said of India’s election: “It’s a huge, huge test for us.”
“We have months and months and months of preparation in India,” he told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “We have teams working around the clock. We have fact checkers in multiple languages operating in India. We have a 24-hour escalation system.”
YouTube is another problematic site for disinformation in India, experts say. To test how well that video-sharing platform was doing in enforcing its own rules, researchers at the nonprofits Global Witness and Access Now created 48 fake ads in English, Hindi and Telugu with false voting information or calls for violence. One claimed India raised its voting age to 21, though it remains 18, while another said women could vote by text message, though they cannot. A third called for the use of force at polling places.
When Global Witness submitted the ads to YouTube for approval, the response was disappointing, said Henry Peck, an investigator at Global Witness.
“YouTube didn’t act on any of them,” Peck said, and instead approved the ads for publication.
Google, YouTube’s owner, criticized the research and noted that it has multiple procedures in place to catch ads that violate its rules. Global Witness removed the ads before they could be spotted and blocked, the company said.
“Our policies explicitly prohibit ads making demonstrably false claims that could undermine participation or trust in an election, which we enforce in several Indian languages,” Google said in a statement. The company also noted its partnerships with fact-checking groups.
AI is this year’s newest threat, as advances in programs make it easier than ever to create lifelike images, video or audio. AI deepfakes are popping up in elections across the world, from Moldova to Bangladesh.
Senthil Nayagam, founder of an AI startup called Muonium AI, believes there is growing demand for deepfakes, especially of politicians. In the run up to the election, he had several inquiries on making political videos using AI. “There’s a market for this, no doubt,” he said.
Some of the fakes Nayagam produces feature dead politicians and are not meant to be taken seriously, but other deepfakes circulating online could potentially fool voters. It’s a danger Modi himself has highlighted.
“We need to educate people about artificial intelligence and deepfakes, how it works, what it can do,” Modi said.
India’s Information and Technology Ministry has directed social media companies to remove disinformation, especially deepfakes. But experts say a lack of clear regulation or law focused on AI and deepfakes makes it harder to squash, leaving it to voters to determine what is true and what is fiction.
For first-time voter Ankita Jasra, 18, these uncertainties can make it hard to know what to believe.
“If I don’t know what is being said is true, I don’t think I can trust in the people that are governing my country,” she said.
As India votes, misinformation surges on social media: ‘The whole country is paying the price’
https://arab.news/jyttx
As India votes, misinformation surges on social media: ‘The whole country is paying the price’
- Tech companies like Google and Meta say they are working to combat deceptive or hateful content while helping voters find reliable sources
- Researchers say their promises ring hollow after years of failed enforcement, “cookie-cutter” approaches that fail to account for India’s diversity
UN chief calls Cyprus peace talks ‘constructive’
- Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta
UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that meetings between Cyprus’s rival leaders at the organization’s New York headquarters were “constructive,” even as questions remained about crossing points on the divided island.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar have been holding talks and had reached a breakthrough on forming a committee on youth and three other topics, Guterres said.
The opening of four crossing points, and the exploitation of solar energy in the buffer zone between the two sides of the island remained unresolved, he said.
“It is critical to implement these initiatives, all of them, as soon as possible, and for the benefit of all Cypriots,” Guterres said.
The meeting follows one in Geneva in March, which marked the first meaningful progress in years.
At that gathering, both sides agreed on a set of confidence-building measures, including opening more crossing points across the divide, cooperating on solar energy, and removing land mines.
Guterres said there were specific technical issues still to be resolved on the issues of crossing points, but did not give details.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognized only by Ankara.
The internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, controls the island’s majority Greek Cypriot south.
The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.
“I think we are building, step-by-step, confidence and creating conditions to do concrete things to benefit the Cypriot people,” Guterres said in remarks to reporters.
US designates group that claimed Kashmir attack as terrorists
- Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir
WASHINGTON: The United States on Thursday designated as terrorists a shadowy group that claimed an April attack in Kashmir, which triggered Indian strikes on Pakistani territory.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described The Resistance Front as a “front and proxy” of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist group based in Pakistan.
The terrorist designation “demonstrates the Trump administration’s commitment to protecting our national security interests, countering terrorism, and enforcing President (Donald) Trump’s call for justice for the Pahalgam attack,” Rubio said in a statement.
Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir.
Little had been previously known about The Resistance Front, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
India designates TRF as a terrorist organization and the India-based Observer Research Foundation calls it “a smokescreen and an offshoot of LeT.”
Pakistan has denied responsibility for the attack.
US House passes landmark crypto bills in win for Trump
- It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority
WASHINGTON: The US House passed landmark cryptocurrency bills on Thursday, delivering on the Trump administration’s embrace of the once-controversial industry.
US lawmakers easily passed the CLARITY Act, which establishes a clearer regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
The bill is intended to clarify rules governing the industry and divides regulatory authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission .
It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority.
House legislators also easily passed the GENIUS Act, which codifies the use of stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to safe assets like the dollar. That bill was due to immediately go to Trump for his signature to become law.
The GENIUS Act was passed by the Senate last month and sets rules such as requiring issuers to have reserves of assets equal in value to that of their outstanding cryptocurrency.
The raft of legislation comes after years of suspicion against the crypto industry amid the belief that the sector, born out of the success of bitcoin, should be kept on a tight leash and away from mainstream investors.
But after crypto investors poured millions of dollars into his presidential campaign last year, Trump reversed his own doubts about the industry, even launching a Trump meme coin and other ventures as he prepared for his return to the White House.
Trump has, among other moves, appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission .
He has also established a federal “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” aimed at auditing the government’s bitcoin holdings, which were mainly accumulated by law enforcement from judicial seizures.
The Republican-led House is also considering a bill it calls the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act that aims to block the issuance of a central bank digital currency — a digital dollar issued by the US Federal Reserve.
Republicans argue that a CBDC could enable the federal government to monitor, track, and potentially control the financial transactions of private citizens, undermining privacy and civil liberties.
It would require a not-easily-won passage in the Senate before going to Trump for his signature.
An aborted effort to set the anti-CBDC bill aside caused a furor among a small group of Republicans and delayed the passage of the two other bills before a solution was found.
‘A trap’ — Asylum seekers arrested after attending US courts
NEW YORK: In gloomy corridors outside a Manhattan courtroom, masked agents target and arrest migrants attending mandatory hearings — part of US President Donald Trump’s escalating immigration crackdown.
Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to deport many migrants, has encouraged authorities to be more aggressive as he seeks to hit his widely-reported target of one million deportations annually.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Homeland Security agents have adopted the tactic of waiting outside immigration courts nationwide and arresting migrants as they leave at the end of asylum hearings.
Missing an immigration court hearing is a crime in some cases and can itself make migrants liable to be deported, leaving many with little choice but to attend and face arrest.
Armed agents with shields from different federal agencies loitered outside the court hearings in a tower block in central New York, holding paperwork with photographs of migrants to be targeted, an AFP correspondent saw this week.
The agents arrested almost a dozen migrants from different countries in just a few hours on the 12th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.
Brad Lander, a city official who was briefly detained last month by ICE agents as he attempted to accompany a migrant targeted for removal, called the hearings “a trap.”
“It has the trappings of a judicial hearing, but it’s just a trap to have made them come in the first place,” he said Wednesday outside the building.
Lander recounted several asylum seekers being arrested by immigration officers including Carlos, a Paraguayan man who Lander said had an application pending for asylum under the Convention Against Torture — as well as a future court date.
“The judge carefully instructed him on how to prepare to bring his case to provide additional information about his interactions with the Paraguayan police and make his case under the global convention against torture for why he is entitled to asylum,” Lander said.
After his hearing, agents “without any identifying information or badges or warrants grabbed Carlos, and then quickly moved him toward the back stairwell,” he said.
Lander, a Democrat, claimed the agents were threatening and that they pushed to the ground Carlos’s sister who had accompanied him to the hearing.
The White House said recently that “the brave men and women of ICE are under siege by deranged Democrats — but undeterred in their mission.”
“Every day, these heroes put their own lives on the line to get the worst of the worst... off our streets and out of our neighborhoods.”
Back at the building in lower Manhattan, Lander said that “anyone who comes down here to observe could see... the rule of law is being eroded.”
US prosecutor in Epstein, Maxwell cases abruptly fired
WASHINGTON: A US federal prosecutor who handled the case of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and is the daughter of a prominent critic of President Donald Trump has been abruptly fired, US media reported.
Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was dismissed on Wednesday from her position as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan, several major US outlets reported.
The Justice Department declined to confirm Comey’s firing to AFP, saying it would have “no comment on personnel.”
Politico published a message Comey, who spent 10 years in the US attorney’s office, sent to her former colleagues in which she said she had been “summarily fired” by the Justice Department with no reason given.
She also encouraged them not to fall prey to “fear.”
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” Comey said. “Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant.”
Comey’s dismissal comes a week after the Justice Department confirmed it had opened an unspecified criminal investigation into her father, a long-time Trump adversary.
It also comes amid mounting pressure on Trump to release material from the probe into Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking.
Comey was among the prosecutors who handled the case involving the wealthy financier, which never went to trial because of his death.
She also prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the only former Epstein associate who has been criminally charged in connection with his activities.
Trump is facing the most serious split in his loyal right-wing base since he returned to power over claims his administration is covering up lurid details of Epstein’s crimes to protect rich and powerful figures.
The Trump-supporting far-right has long latched on to the scandal, claiming the existence of a still-secret list of Epstein’s powerful clients and that the late financier was in fact murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up.
The Justice Department and FBI said this month that there was no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Comey’s father, the former FBI chief, has had a contentious history with Trump dating back to his first term in the White House.
Trump fired Comey in 2017 as the then-FBI chief was leading an investigation into whether any members of the Trump campaign had colluded with Moscow to sway the 2016 presidential vote, in which the Republican beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Since taking office in January, Trump has taken a number of punitive measures against his perceived enemies, stripping former officials of their security clearances and protective details, targeting law firms involved in past cases against him and pulling federal funding from universities.
