Deepfakes and influencers: The digital election in India
Divyendra Jadoun is proud of his professional alias: the Indian Deepfaker.
“I know we do deepfakes,” he tells Sky News. “Why would I use something else?”
And Jadoun’s services have been in demand recently, as India holds elections – often billed as the biggest democratic election on the planet.
Deepfakes have been a feature, in some surprising ways. On occasion, they have been malicious. Bollywood actors have been falsely depicted criticising PM Narendra Modi, or endorsing a political party.
Jadoun says: “We received a lot of requests, from November, October. And out of those requests, around 45 to 50% requests were for unethical [deepfakes]. And these are two kinds of requests.
“One is to swap the face of the political leader and put it into some controversial video that might harm his image. The second type of unethical [deepfake] is to create the clone of, the voice of the opponent leader and make him say something that he has never said.”
“This is the first time that we are going to see the deployment of deepfakes on a large scale. Even for us, it’s a new thing.
“We do not know how much it will impact or whether it will have an impact or not.”
Pic: AP
Others point to the low numbers of views those deepfake videos tend to receive, along with the speed at which they get debunked – and say that the impact of deepfakes has been, perhaps unexpectedly, positive.
“There was a fear that deepfake type of things would be more used for adversarial content, whereas what we are seeing is the opposite,” explains Joyojeet Pal, associate professor of information at the University of Michigan.
“The artificially generated content is much more being used by the campaigns of politicians in their own interest.”
Witness the resurrection of M Karunanidhi, a politician who died in 2018. A deepfake of him was created by technologist Senthil Nayagam and subsequently put on the campaign trail, endorsing various candidates.
“We accidentally started the trend with this video,” Nayagam tells Sky News.
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Pic: AP
The Indian Deepfaker has worked on another system that shows the potential innovation of deepfakes.
“We are doing a conversational agent where you will get a call in the voice of a leader. It will be saying that I am an AI-generated avatar of this leader, and he will be taking the name of the person,” he says.
“He will be asking ‘What are your local issues in your area?’ or ‘What are your suggestions to the government?’ – and every call will be recorded.
“It will then be transcribed and it will be filtered out based on different questions, so that the government or the political parties can make manifestos or can create schemes according to the problem.”
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From April: Is India’s Narendra Modi popular?
There are still pitfalls. Jadoun is worried about deepfakes spreading through the messaging system WhatsApp rather than the open internet, where they are easier to debunk. WhatsApp is where more traditional misinformation has spread, according to Amber Sinha.
“I think it’s also been early days, in terms of [the deepfake] use case in India,” he tells Sky News.
“There have been other modes of content, for instance, doctored images, Photoshopped images that have been prevalent, particularly on WhatsApp groups, for much longer in India.”
WhatsApp is, for many people in India, simply the internet. Platforms that dominate in other democracies remain niche. Take ad spending on Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram (and WhatsApp, although it doesn’t show ads).
The ruling BJP is clearly dominating, according to the data provided by Who Targets Me. But compare that to US spending.
The US isn’t even holding an election – at least not yet – and it is comfortably outspending India.
And Pal argues that other platforms have now caught up with WhatsApp.
“WhatsApp groups were the big player in the fairly recent elections as well,” he says. “YouTube is either at par or more important than WhatsApp right now.”
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The most novel digital development of this election, he argues, is the emergence of YouTube influencers.
Earlier this month, for example, Curly Tales, a food blogger with more than three million followers, featured the chief minister of Maharashtra on her channel. And politicians have been making concerted attempts to woo influencers across the board.
AP file pic
“The most surprising thing about the campaign has been the emergence of digital influencers over professional journalists as the interviewers in the campaigns themselves,” Pal says.
“As opposed to a professional journalist who might be fairly educated about policy and can ask a politician aggressive questions about what is or is not working about their platform, a digital influencer doesn’t have that ability.”
For all the innovation, deepfakes and influencers do perhaps open up an information gap – one where doubt and misinformation can spread, inadvertently or not.
World
Director of one of last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza detained in Israeli military raid
The director of one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza was arrested in a raid the Israeli military said was targeting a Hamas command centre.
The Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry said Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was held by Israeli forces on Friday along with dozens of other staff and taken to an interrogation centre.
Sky News has spoken to patients who say they were forced outside and told to strip in winter weather after troops stormed the hospital.
Israel‘s military said it “conducted and completed a targeted operation” as the hospital was being used as a command centre for Hamas military operations.
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya. File pic
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) statement said more than 240 terrorists were detained, some of whom tried to pose as patients or flee using ambulances.
Among those taken for questioning are the hospital’s director, who it said was suspected of being a “Hamas terrorist operative”.
Around 15 people involved in last year’s 7 October attack on southern Israel, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 250 others abducted, were also detained, the IDF said.
The Israeli military said hundreds of patients and staff were evacuated to another hospital before and during the operation, and it had provided fuel and medical supplies to both hospitals.
Militants fired on its forces and they were “eliminated”, while weapons, including grenades, guns, munitions, and military equipment, were also seized in the raid, it said.
The Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 45,400 Palestinians, over half of them women and children, and wounded more than 108,000 others, according to the health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The hospital has been hit multiple times over the past three months by Israeli troops waging an offensive in largely isolated northern Gaza against Hamas fighters it says have regrouped.
The health ministry said a strike on the hospital earlier this week killed five medical personnel.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was “appalled” by Friday’s raid, which it said put northern Gaza’s last major health facility “out of service”.
“The systematic dismantling of the health system and a siege for over 80 days… puts the lives of the 75,000 Palestinians remaining in the area at risk,” a statement said.
The Israeli military said in a statement: “The IDF will continue to act in accordance with international law regarding medical facilities, including those where Hamas has chosen to embed its military infrastructure and conduct terrorist activities in blatant violation of international law.”
Former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh has been cremated after a state funeral as politicians and the public mourned his death.
Widely regarded as the architect of the country’s economic reform programme, he died on Thursday aged 92.
His body was taken on Saturday morning to the headquarters of his Congress party in New Delhi, where party leaders and activists paid tribute to him and chanted: “Manmohan Singh lives forever.”
Former Indian PM Manmohan Singh pictured in 2014. File pic: AP
Abhishek Bishnoi, a party leader, said Mr Singh’s death was big loss for the country.
“He used to speak little, but his talent and his actions spoke louder than his words,” he said.
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Later, Mr Singh’s body was transported to a crematorium ground for his last rites as soldiers beat drums.
Government officials, politicians and family members paid their last respects to Mr Singh, whose casket was adorned with flowers and wrapped in the Indian flag.
Indian President Draupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called Mr Singh one of the country’s “most distinguished leaders”, attended the funeral ceremony.
Gursharan Kaur (right), wife of Mr Singh, attends his funeral. Pic: AP
Mr Singh’s body was then transferred to a pyre as religious hymns played and he was cremated.
Authorities have declared a seven-day mourning period and cancelled all cultural and entertainment events during that time.
Mr Singh was prime minister for 10 years and leader of the Congress party in parliament’s upper house.
He was chosen to be prime minister in 2004 by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Mr Singh was re-elected in 2009, but his second term was clouded by financial scandals.
This led to the Congress party’s crushing defeat in the 2014 national elections by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
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