By Bidisha Saha: Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist, was murdered by three gunmen outside her home in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017, to “save his religion” as admitted by one of the assailants. A new research by a group of journalists and experts reveals how a doctored video was weaponised to spread hate against her.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based non-profit organisation, investigated the video from YouTube that was downloaded onto one of the murderers’ laptops. Police revealed to the research firm that the video, which features a five-minute excerpt of a 15-minute-long speech in which Lankesh discusses the plurality of Hinduism, was used as an element in a “gradual indoctrination” process.
Digital Witness Lab, a Princeton University-funded research firm that uncovers surveillance and the spread of misinformation, investigated the spread of a morphed video of Gauri Lankesh’s 2012 speech on social media, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, in an effort to gauge its role in fuelling animosity against the journalist.
Forbidden Stories, with the mission “to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”, aided in the investigation while also pursuing Lankesh’s incomplete work on fake news.
Forbidden Stories brought together a consortium of 100 journalists from 30 countries to investigate the global disinformation industry as part of ‘Story Killers’ project.
Initial Observations
After a joint investigation by Forbidden Stories and Digital Witness Lab, a report has been released. As per the investigation, the video shared on social media platforms before her murder received more than 130 million interactions on Facebook and over 250,000 views on YouTube.
Using open-source tools, Princeton’s researchers found evidence of eight different YouTube links that were shared widely on Facebook, including three that had more than 100 million interactions (likes, shares and comments).
While the overall engagement was low on Twitter, the video was shared by a Bajrang Dal member, Bhuvith Shetty, who had been linked to several acts of violence and online hate speech. That video was also shared by BJP Karnataka’s official Facebook page in 2014, three years before she was murdered. This created “an intense and vitriolic character assassination that painted her as anti-Hindu well before the plan to assassinate her had been hatched”, the report mentioned.
IMAGE BJP Screenshot
IMAGE CAPTION: Screenshot of the BJP Karnataka page’s post from 2014 that links to the Aug. 8, 2012 video
Modus Operandi
The video was published across multiple platforms using different accounts mimicking the same language, suggesting potentially coordinated posting. In each case, the video is lightly edited and opens with a black screen that flashes the words “WHY I HATE SECULARISM IN INDIA”. It was downloaded from YouTube by alleged mastermind Amol Kale and shown to at least five members of the “unnamed organized crime syndicate”, namely Parashuran Waghmare, Amit Degwekar, Manohar Dundappa Edave, Vikas Patil and Sujith Kumar.
Gauri Lankesh’s Speech On YouTube
IMAGE YouTube Screenshot
The video of Gauri Lankesh’s 2012 speech in Mangalore was uploaded by user account MrPwan (Sushmitha Joshi) in August 2012 and removed sometime after April 2019. We found eight copies of the “Real Face of Secularism” video on YouTube. Two had been uploaded before Lankesh was murdered on September 5, 2017.
As a part of data collection, researchers combed through videos containing Lankesh’s name and the terms ‘real’, ‘face’ and ‘secularism’ in that order, the words ‘Lankesh’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘hate’ in any order and videos that were the same length as the first video. Out of the eight copies of the same video, only two were shared on the platform before Lankesh’s murder and make up 96% of the total number of views for all the videos.
IMAGE Digital Witness Lab
IMAGE Caption: Digital Witness Lab Source: Internet Archive YouTube Metadata Collection and Forbidden Stories
Facebook Interactions Of The Video
Out of the eight YouTube videos, four videos had been taken down from YouTube by 2019 and three received more than 113 million Facebook interactions each. Similar to YouTube, the most popular of these was the oldest video that was uploaded on August 8, 2012, with id JFsbhGoBCAI, according to the investigation.
Collectively, posts that referenced this video garnered more than 30 million reactions, 6.5 million comments and 76 million shares, according to CrowdTangle, a content discovery and social-monitoring platform by Facebook. Since a vast number of the interactions with the video took place in private posts or channels or public posts that have since been taken down, the exact number of views on this video is hard to calculate.
IMAGE Crowd Tangle
IMAGE CAPTION: Screenshot of CrowdTangle showing engagement metrics for the video that was uploaded to YouTube on Aug. 8, 2012.
Scouring Twitter
The video first appeared in a tweet by user GarudaPurana aka Bhuvith Shetty on August 9, 2012. The tweet links to the oldest video uploaded on YouTube with the id JFsbhGoBCAI and was posted a day after the video was uploaded. The link is from a domain belonging to Facebook, indicating that the user shared the video from there.
IMAGE Bhuvith Twitter Screenshot
Bhuvith Shetty is a Bajrang Dal member who has been critical of Lankesh’s leftist views and spared no opportunity to bash her evening newspaper named Gauri Lankesh Patrike. In 2015, he also started an online petition on change.org, seeking the arrest of Lankesh for “hurting religious sentiments”, which amassed 587 signatures.
IMAGE Overall Node Module
IMAGE CAPTION: Node Module by Forbidden Stories to Indicate the links between different elements that led to the assassination in 2017
Gauri Lankesh, who often regarded herself as a journalist-activist, saw “combating fake news spread by the BJP as part of a larger battle against the Indian far-right”. Her growing visibility as a newsperson contesting Hindu nationalism made her an “inconvenient journalist” and allegedly troubled powerful interests in Karnataka which “contributed to seeding narratives to create religious strife”, the report added.
Her news daily was losing subscribers in the years before her death and accruing debt because she refused to take on advertisers and had become the target of near-constant online harassment.
Picking up where Gauri Lankesh left off, Forbidden Stories investigated Postcard News and found that in the years since the journalist’s murder, Mahesh Vikram Hegde has moved closer to BJP by co-founding a company whose director, Beluru Sudarshana, is an active adviser but “not an employee” to the party as told to Forbidden Stories. His portal ‘Postcard News’ relentlessly relayed false information about the criminal investigation into Gauri’s murder to divert suspicion as to the involvement of the Bajrang Dal in this murder, the report claims.
A popular YouTube channel called TV Vikrama, owned by Mahesh Vikram Hegde, has more than 300,000 subscribers, despite a lawsuit filed against Hegde in 2018 for spreading misinformation and two complaints for defamatory content and possible document tampering.
IMAGE Postcard News Article
IMAGE CAPTION: A Postcard News Article castigating Gauri Lankesh, crossposted on Facebook
Forbidden Stories concluded the investigative piece by anointing her as a “victim of disinformation”, who was facing a trial “because of this speech..” she wrote on Twitter several months earlier. However, she never had the chance to stand before a court and defend her views in eyes of the public.
After the journalist’s death, colleagues and friends started a fact-checking project she had dreamed of by creating the Gauri Media Trust and ‘Naanu Gauri’, an independent digital media outlet and fact-checking initiative.
