Will CNN have wall-to-wall coverage of India interfering in the 2020 presidential election? Will CNN reporters dumpster dive in New Delhi? Will CNN contributors call for the bombing of the Taj Mahal?
A new report reveals that former Vice President Joe Biden’s Twitter accoutn was given a “sizazble boost” soon after picking Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate due to thousands of fake followers from rural Indian troll farms.
From Newsweek:
A Zenger News investigation reveals that Biden’s increasing social media footprint in India came from the country’s infamous troll farms boosting his candidacy.
Kamala Harris’s ethic heritage is in part rooted in India, but her share of Indian and apparently Indian followers is far lower, about 0.12 percent.
Some of the operators who worked on the campaign spoke at length about how propaganda agencies in New Delhi and Mumbai activated a widely distributed troll network to amplify Biden’s campaign impact on Twitter.
“This was started as an internet café by my father in the late 1990s,” said Harshit Patel, owner of said troll farm. “Back then, men came in mostly for chatting in IRC [Internet Relay Chat] rooms and surfing porn. It was brisk business. But then internet became so cheap and everyone got smartphones and business petered out. We had to rely on passengers asking to print railway tickets, fill up online forms, and get documents photocopied. But that didn’t even cover the costs of maintaining the PCs and paying the electricity bill. Things changed in 2012–13 when [Narendra] Modi started his campaign for prime minister. And this became my main business.”
Foreign interference in an election? Shocking!
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