The Anti-India Influence Machine: Troll Farms, Fake News, Newsrooms, Algorithms and AI :: Himanshu Anand :: Security & Other Notes

The Anti-India Influence Machine: Troll Farms, Fake News, Newsrooms, Algorithms and AI

2026-08-14 ::

Himanshu Anand

:: 58 min read (12259 words)

#cybersecurity

#disinformation

#influence-operations

#social-media

#ai

#india

Table of Contents

The Anti-India Influence Machine: Troll Farms, Fake News, Newsrooms, Algorithms and AI⌗

Scope and disclaimer: This is a cybersecurity research article focused on India because I am from India, India is the information environment I notice most and the change became personally obvious to me after Operation Sindoor. It is not an accusation against an entire country, nationality, religion or political group. The same playbook is used against many communities around the world and this article separates verified platform attribution from research-based indications and unverified allegations. Criticism of India, the Indian government or any Indian political party is not automatically anti-India hate. The subject here is coordinated deception, fake identities, manufactured amplification and language that attacks Indians as people.

Content warning: Some sections discuss racist stereotypes, threats and alleged calls for violence. I have avoided reproducing slurs or naming people from unauthenticated screenshots unless a reliable public investigation established the connection.

Evidence-media note: The local evidence images are low-resolution excerpts from public takedown reports and fact-checking investigations, used here for criticism, verification and research commentary. Keep each caption and source link attached to the image, do not present an investigator’s annotation as an original social-media post and review the source publisher’s terms before commercial or syndicated republication. Video shortcodes load the original YouTube or Vimeo host rather than copying the video into this package.

TLDR⌗

I had seen anti-India posts for years and mostly treated them as the normal background radiation of the internet. After Operation Sindoor, however, my timeline began filling with the same small set of insults in places where they made no sense: Indians are dirty, Indians do not use deodorant, cow urine, cow dung, street-defecation memes and random videos from anywhere in South Asia relabelled as India. The repetition felt less like spontaneous criticism and more like somebody had handed the internet a very boring script.

The research shows that coordinated networks are real, but the phrase “one giant anti-India botnet” is usually the wrong model. What exists is closer to an influence supply chain in which state-linked employees, political interests, public-relations firms, fake media brands, account operators, volunteers, influencers, AI tools, genuine racists and recommendation algorithms can all play a part. Some networks are automated, many are human-operated nd most are hybrids.

The strongest public findings include:

Meta linked one specific 2019 Pakistan-origin network to employees of Inter-Services Public Relations or ISPR , the Pakistani military’s communications organisation. That network used 103 Facebook and Instagram assets and reached Pages followed by roughly 2.8 million accounts.

Meta and Graphika connected a separate 2021 network to individuals associated with AlphaPro , a Pakistan-based PR firm. It used fake media outlets, fake identities, professional presenters, paid actors and freelance journalists to push political narratives, including material attacking India.

Stanford Internet Observatory documented a Pakistan-based mass-reporting network that used a Chrome extension called Auto Reporter . Researchers identified the public developer and his company connection, but explicitly said they did not know who controlled the wider operation.

Google removed 447 Pakistan-linked YouTube channels across three reported quarters from late 2025 to mid-2026. The channels supported Pakistan and criticised India, although Google did not publicly identify a government sponsor.

A 2026 report on high-engagement anti-Indian posts on X counted more than 24,600 posts from nearly 14,000 authors , with more than 300 million reported views, 8.5 million likes and 901,000 reposts during 2025. Much of this activity came from Western nativist and immigration politics, which is an important reminder that not every anti-Indian account is Pakistani or state-controlled.

During the May 2025 India–Pakistan crisis, one research group collected roughly 1,200 misleading or relevant posts across major platforms. Its closer X sample contained 437 posts, 179 from verified accounts, while only 73 had Community Notes at the time of analysis. Individual fake visuals reached millions of views.

The visual evidence is not limited to charts. This version follows real cases involving a 2023 naval-drill image presented as a...