Author: Munsif Vengattil, Saurabh Sharma and Rishika Sadam
BENGALURU/LUCKNOW (Reuters) – As India’s election campaign heats up, doctored videos take center stage, with fake videos involving two of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s top aides sparking police investigations and arrests Some functionaries of its rival Congress party.
In what has been billed as India’s first artificial intelligence election, Modi said last week that fake voices were being used to show leaders making “statements that we never thought of”, calling it a conspiracy to “create tension in society”.
Indian police, already investigating the circulation of fake videos of Bollywood actors criticizing Modi, are now looking into a doctored online video in which federal home minister Amit Shah said the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party would stop Certain social security for ethnic minorities is a sensitive topic for ethnic minorities.
Shah countered on X, releasing his “original” and edited “fake” speech and claiming without providing any evidence that the main opposition Congress was behind the video it had produced to mislead the public. “Instructions have been issued to the police to resolve the issue,” the minister said.
Indian police arrested at least nine people, including six members of Congress’s social media team, last week in Assam, Gujarat, Telangana and New Delhi for spreading fake videos, according to a police statement.
Five Congress workers have been released on bail, but the most high-profile arrest by the Delhi police’s cybercrime unit came on Friday when they detained Arun Reddy, the Congress’s national social media coordinator. The reason is that he shared the video. New Delhi is one of the areas where the Shah’s ministry has direct control over the police. Reddy has been detained for three days.
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The arrest sparked protests by congressional staff, with many posting on X using the hashtag #ReleaseArunReddy. Congressman Manikam Tagore said the arrest was an example of “abuse of power by a dictatorship”.
Congress social media chief Supriya Shrinate did not respond to messages and emails seeking comment.
misinformation
India’s elections from April 19 to June 1 will be the world’s largest democratic event.
With nearly 1 billion voters and more than 800 million Internet users, tackling the spread of misinformation is a high-stakes undertaking. It involves round-the-clock surveillance by police and election officials, who often issue takedown orders to Facebook (NASDAQ: ) and X as investigations begin.
More than 500 people in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, monitor online content closely, flagging controversial posts and coordinating with social media companies, police chief Prashant Kumar told Reuters on Saturday. Remove it when needed.
Another fake video that sparked an uproar last week showed the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, criticizing Modi for not doing enough for the families of those killed in 2019 militant attacks. While fact-checkers said the video was created using different parts of the original clip, state police called it an “artificial intelligence-generated deepfake.”
State police used Internet address tracing to arrest a man named Shyam Gupta on May 2, who had shared the fake video post on X the day before, racking up more than 3,000 views and 11 likes.
Under Indian law, police charged Gupta with forging documents and inciting hostility, which carries a prison sentence of up to seven years if convicted. Reuters was unable to contact him because he is currently serving a 14-day detention period.
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“This man is not a technical person. If he was technically savvy, it would not have been possible to arrest him quickly,” Inspector Kumar said.
