How information technology is being used to create an alternate reality. An extract

Saadia Azim

Understanding how IT cells function requires looking beyond individual viral posts to the systematic machinery that produces them. The operation follows a clear, repeatable pattern—one that has been refined over years of digital campaigning.

Content Creations: Manufacturing the Message

At the core of the cell, sit specialized teams tasked with generating targeted narratives. Their raw materials include opposition statements taken out of context, fabricated data and old videos repackaged with misleading captions. The goal is focused on emotional impact.

Consider the long-running campaign that caricatured Rahul Gandhi as an unintelligent and childlike, a ‘Pappu’. Beginning in 2014, memes and viral clips, many edited or stripped of context, flooded social media. The ‘Pappu’ branding stuck but it was not organic. Party affiliated handles, meme pages and WhatsApp forwards amplified it relentlessly until it became widely accepted as fact rather than a constructed narrative. This is content creation as political warfare; taking a kernel of reality distorting it through selective editing and packaging it for maximum viral potential.

Narrative Seeding: Planting the First Version

Once created, the disinformation must be planted. It is seeded across WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, X, Facebook and YouTube. Often, fake profiles or bot accounts provide the initial momentum creating the illusion that ‘everyone is talking about this’.

The August 2024 rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata, discussed in another context earlier illustrates this pattern as well. A horrific crime was rapidly transformed into a communal flashpoint through the coordinated spread of disinformation. IT cell-affiliated pages falsely claimed the accused was Muslim and had ties to a senior political leader, claims that were contradicted by official police reports. The narrative expanded further—the victim’s family was allegedly being silenced by a ‘Muslim mafia’, the perpetrators were supposedly illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. None of this was true, though all of it spread widely.

This disinformation pipeline operates with mechanical precision. First, an individual user gives the news a provocative communal spin, drawing on existing stereotypes or political grudges. Then, this version is picked up and amplified across hundreds of accounts. Memes appear. Videos are doctored. Captions are crafted to trigger outrage. The message occupies massive digital real estate, trending not because it’s true but because it’s engineered to trend.