Even as the Centre’s move to render Article 370 relating to Jammu & Kashmir inoperative was being debated in India, cybercrime officials said they had detected an attempt to create conflict in cyberspace.
Over the last two days, Indian cybercrime agencies had been mapping an increasing trend of tweets with inflammatory content and hashtags that were allegedly being tweeted from across the border, officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, asserted. On Tuesday, a total of 1.58 lakh tweets were recorded with the hashtag #ModiKillingKashmiris.
Cybercrime officials said that after the first few tweets were noticed, agencies from various States started tracking the trend, after which the tweets were traced to Pakistan. While some of the users had mentioned their location in their bios, others were traced with the help of geo-mapping tools.
Pak. cities, UAE
“So far, we have traced users to locations like Islamabad, Lahore, Punjab, Karachi, Sargodha, Sialkot, Multan, Peshawar, Bahawalnagar, Sahiwal, Singh, Chachro and Jhang Sadar in Pakistan, with a few tweets from the United Arab Emirates as well,” said an officer, declining to be identified. “There are also some accounts which are actually from Pakistan but have Indian names, aimed at misleading people,” the officer asserted.
The hashtag was trending at the highest position on Tuesday, with as many as 351 tweets being posted within a span of 10 minutes. These tweets, according to a study by cybercrime officials, reached 3.9 lakh people, were retweeted over 27,000 times and got more than 75,000 ‘likes’.
Agencies also found that while the original tweets were comparatively few, retweets were the highest.
“Of the total impressions made in the 10-minute span, 12.5% were the actual tweets, while 86% were retweets and 1.5% were replies,” the officer said.
Another official said that investigations so far indicated a concerted attempt at flooding cyberspace with inflammatory content and then relying on the tendency of other users to ‘blindly’ retweet without going through all the content. Some of the tweets, put out by the perpetrators on Tuesday, had some very high figures of alleged atrocities committed by Indian authorities in Kashmir.
“The content and the hashtags are decided beforehand by a large group of perpetrators,” the official, who is part of the investigation, said. “Once this is finalised, it is circulated far and wide,” the official added.
