When misinformation is weaponised

THESE are very strange times. According to a sudden spate of polling activity, we are now told that we suffer from severe unhappiness, a disinformation deluge and the worst airlines in the world. Certainly, some of this is true. We do have some of the top-10 ranks in the world in terms of air pollution, but the deluge of negative polling is suspicious, especially when no one bothered to point out any of these in the pathetic 1970s when our cities were even dirtier and we had few airlines to speak of. It’s curious that when we start reaching somewhere near the top of the financial mountain, there are many hands pushing us back. Some of those sources are interesting, and their methodologies even more so.

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To be seen as backing transparency and rooting out corruption is something even the public will appreciate and defend against all comers.

The first is the puzzling polling. The World Happiness Report puts India below war-torn Mali and Liberia. This report uses data from a variety of sources, including Gallup, with a sample size of 2,000-3,000 for each country. India has a population of some 1.4 billion. Then there was an index that put an Indian airline — the third largest in the world — at almost the bottom, while an airline that is struggling to have even 50 more aircraft in a decade was the top gun.

According to the World Air Quality Index, India accounts for some of the most polluted cities across the globe. That’s fair enough, given that most of us are gasping for breath. But here’s an interesting snippet. Air quality in Beijing was red-flagged by the US embassy in 2008, leading to a strong demand for action. China literally threw out polluting industries from the capital and imposed strong environmental restrictions in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. That led directly to losses totalling 408.7 billion yuan (about 6.5 per cent of the regional GDP), with manufacturing dropping significantly. US action did allow the Chinese to breathe, but that’s another story. The point is, public information matters. The trick is how to put it there.

The Global Risks Report, made by the World Economic Forum, ranked India the highest in terms of misinformation and disinformation. Strangely, respondents put disinformation as the highest risk, at a time of the (then) upcoming elections, well above disasters, crime and climate change. But go carefully into some details. Those polled are ‘global leaders’ across academia, etc. The data reflects what they think, and the most polled are from Europe (38 per cent), while 7 per cent are from South Asia. Interestingly, the report doesn’t say that disinformation originates from India, but that it is rife in the country. The report nonetheless takes exception to new government rules, obliging all concerned to make ‘reasonable efforts’ to disable misinformation. That’s a bit puzzling. Apparently, one is expected to just grin and bear it.

Meanwhile, that disinformation is affecting our internal stability is a given, with fake videos most recently linked to the Sambhal mosque incident. Others related to Bangladesh are damaging to foreign policy. Yes, there is a problem. The question is where it originates or is being tuned from.

A research report by Drop Site is now public knowledge, exposing the workings of the OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), which works with dozens of major newspapers to collaboratively publish major political scoops. Its single largest donor is the US State Department, but it also works with other governments. Funds for the OCCRP originally came from counter-narcotics departments, while a top intel officer negotiated its ‘relationship’ with the private sector. Such a complicated overlay of intel, government and private players did the Panama Papers leaks, targeting adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin and members of the Chinese elite, leading eventually to a massive purge in Beijing.

Another was the Pandora Papers, which released 11.9 million documents that exposed offshore accounts of the rich and powerful, including India’s Ambanis and a shifty Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yet the biggest billionaires in the US remained untouched. In this period, US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, for instance, was spending some $683,000 on women and $189,000 on adult entertainment.

Far more secretive and pervasive is a huge Chinese disinformation campaign. New research points to the creation of shell companies, including in the UK, that then run blogs and websites using plagiarised news articles, fake pages and accounts. More seriously, news reports cite ‘spamouflage’, the world’s largest known online disinformation operation run by China to harass US politicians and others — at times threatening its targets with violence — as part of a well-organised intimidation campaign targeting people in the US. Another report cited China’s information operations to affect regional stability in South-East Asia and India, also using ‘content farms’ (content that is designed as clickbait) in Malaysia to spread disinformation.

The upshot of all this is that a barrage of polling, data and misinformation is being used in what seems to be a new regime change methodology, which is faster and easier to run than easily exposed ground intelligence operations. This is only a part of new ‘cognitive’ warfare being fought that aims to erode a country from within, eroding its faith in itself and its leadership. As India rises, expect more of the same. The only way to counter it is to win the trust of your people, at all levels. It’s actually easy. To be seen as clearly backing transparency and thereby rooting out corruption is something even the twittering public will appreciate and defend against all comers. In that case, all that polling data and leaks may actually end up doing some good.