Ahead of Assam polls, AI-generated disinformation targeted Muslims, state Congre ...
The Assam Assembly election campaign witnessed “the first industrialised artificial intelligence disinformation operation” in an Indian state election, an advocacy group said in a report on Tuesday.The organisation, the Foundation Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy, said that the disinformation campaign was part of a strategy in which Muslims were “simultaneously dehumanised, disenfranchised, displaced and erased from cultural memory”.
The study came two days before the Assam Assembly election on Thursday. The results will be announced on May 4.
The report said that it identified 31 confirmed deepfakes targeting Assam Congress chief Gaurav Gogoi by “fabricating his identity as a Pakistani agent and Muslim sympathiser”.
It added that it found “119 documented breaches” of the model code of conduct, but said that the Election Commission took no action in any of such cases.
Social media platforms also did not take down any such content, nor were any labels applied declaring that the posts were generated by AI.
The report said that the model implemented in Assam – voter roll purges, demographic engineering and AI-generated communal content – was being replicated in other parts of the country, including poll-bound West Bengal.
“Assam is the laboratory; the rest of India is the intended market,” the report said.
In West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has alleged that specific communities, including the Matuas, Rajbanshis and minorities, were being targeted for deletion from the voter rolls through the special intensive revision exercise.
Also read: Bengal SIR: 95% of deleted voters in Nandigram are Muslims, shows study
‘Disinformation infrastructure created ahead of polls’
The report alleged that an extensive “disinformation architecture” involving synthetic images, deepfake videos and AI-generated communal content was created ahead of the polls.
It identified 432 posts on Facebook and Instagram as “very likely” or “likely” to have been AI-generated. These posts garnered 45.4 million views and more than 1 lakh likes, it said.
It noted that a single Instagram account – “politooons” – generated 40.2 million views from 102 AI-generated posts, accounting for 88% of all such content views.
The report also noted that the Assam BJP had uploaded and later removed a post that depicted Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range.
The clip was deleted following social media criticism. It combined what appeared to be original footage of the BJP leader handling rifles with AI-generated images portraying Muslims as targets.
The advocacy group mentioned that Sarma said in an interview to Aaj Tak on March 12 that the video “was correct”, but should have identified the men as Bangladeshis.
The report said that the chief minister’s statement showed that the shift in vocabulary from targeting “Miya” Muslims to Bangladeshis was a deliberate legal adjustment rather than a change in intent.
The Assam BJP had made the post against the backdrop of a series of remarks by Sarma targeting Bengali-origin Muslims in the state.
In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin, who migrated to Assam during the colonial era. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.
The report said that, ahead of the elections, several posts calling for the exclusion and economic boycott of “Miya” Muslims were made from the verified social media accounts of Sarma and those of cabinet ministers. Such posts were later “amplified through paid media at scale”, it added.
Also read: Himanta Sarma’s remarks about ‘Miyas’ make a mockery of the Constitution
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