Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference in Indian Election 2024
Chinese Infowar- A case Study:
Summary of the findings:
1. Chinese Disinformation Campaign in Indian Elections: China strategically interfered in the 2024 Indian Lok Sabha elections through disinformation campaigns on the social media platform “X” (formerly Twitter), targeting three key topics: the India-China border clash, India’s heatwaves, and the sale of BrahMos missiles to the Philippines. These campaigns aimed to influence public perception and undermine India’s geopolitical position.
2. Modus Operandi of Chinese Propaganda: The operation began with Chinese media and propaganda accounts such as @thinking_panda, @carlZha, and @zhao_dashuai, who posted disinformation or old news. Smaller bot accounts would then retweet or engage with these posts, boosting their visibility and reach. These accounts followed coordinated patterns, often with limited original content, serving as amplifiers of misinformation.
3. Border Clash Disinformation: Following the Galwan Valley clash, Chinese media sought to tarnish the reputation of the Indian Army by spreading false narratives. These campaigns exploited national sensitivities around military pride, using grey zone tactics to manipulate existing narratives while avoiding direct accusations of propaganda.
4. Heatwave Misinformation: Chinese actors exaggerated the severity of India’s heatwaves during the election season, comparing India unfavourably to China. The narrative promoted a sense of geographical superiority, linking the heatwaves to India’s underdevelopment. This narrative highlighted India’s infrastructural shortcomings and indirectly targeted the government’s policies.
5. BrahMos Missile Controversy: Disinformation campaigns falsely portrayed the BrahMos missile, sold to the Philippines, as faulty and dangerous. This narrative aimed to undermine India’s defence exports and tarnish its global standing while drawing attention away from China’s declining arms exports and substandard weapon quality.
6. Network of Bot Accounts: Analysis revealed that the rt network has 2148 accounts which were primarily responsible for amplifying these disinformation campaigns. Out of this, 91 accounts exhibited typical bot-like behavior and they were reposting tweets across multiple topics, we focused on these accounts and found that most of them have zero original posts and exclusively retweeting content related to the disinformation narratives. Some bots were active only during weekends, indicating moonlighting operations.
7. Originator Accounts Pattern: Accounts identified as originators of the disinformation (e.g., @BeijingDai) displayed high tweet frequencies and focused their posts on promoting or defending China. These accounts operated during specific hours, suggesting organized efforts, likely within professional settings or state-sponsored environments.
8. Unmeasurable Impact — Information Warfare: China employed a strategy of blending false narratives into topics already being discussed in Indian media, such as the border clash and heat waves. This tactic made it difficult to distinguish between real news and disinformation, amplifying the challenge of measuring the exact impact of Chinese propaganda.
9. Targeting Key Geopolitical Players: China’s efforts undermined India’s growing global influence, particularly its relationships with allies like the U.S., Taiwan, Philippines and Southeast Asian nations. By disrupting trust and cooperation between India and its allies, China sought to weaken India’s geopolitical standing.
10. Success Indicators for Chinese Infowar: China’s information warfare tactics had a glimpse of success when some of the fake narratives were picked up by Indian influencers, retweeted by the public, and entered mainstream discourse. The report highlights concern over the long-term implications of such disinformation, especially if these narratives become entrenched in Indian media and public opinion.
This report tries to highlight the sophisticated and covert nature of China’s information warfare in Indian elections, emphasizing the need for vigilance in identifying and countering such disinformation campaigns threatening the well-being of an autonomous and sovereign nation.
Chapter -1
Introduction
The Indian elections are a dramatic carnival with a detailed storyline, featuring various characters and a supporting cast, striking dialogues and statements, and resulting conflicts. The structure and tone are set by the national and regional political parties, while the production design is managed by the Election Commission of India. Indian Lok Sabha election is a real time theatrical performance that has all of Kalidasa’s deep psychological framework and character development and Shakespearean tragedy and comedy. While Indian elections have all the aspects for making of an epic, the only difference is viewers here participate and bear the results of the long show.
Indian elections don’t have singular impact on itself but also on the neighbouring countries and to a great extension the entire world. With an economy of $3.95 trillion, a population of 1.428 billion, and a growth rate of 8.2% (approx.), India is now a key player in economic and geopolitical power play. Mackinder and Spykman stand corrected as of 2024, Indian sub-continent is undoubtedly the area of influence that shapes the world politics.
India is one of the global focal point and countries closely observed the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. A few thousand kilometres to New Delhi’s right saw the most active interest in the power transition. The Chinese interest was particularly active, and it wasn’t limited to tracking and monitoring. The Chinese moved beyond the realm of watching and stepped into controlling the narratives. The cyberspace saw obvious and subtle transmissions of disinformation from Chinese end.
Elon Musk bought twitter in 2022, and resolved to make content moderation less restrictive aiming for free speech and increased transparency with the algorithms and content recommendation settings. The twitter turned into ‘X’ and the Chinese expropriated these reforms to disseminate disinformation. They weren’t solely limited to ‘X’ but our findings in this report focus on their developments on ‘X’ platform.
About the Project
In 2024 we collaborated with a group of Indian Election Observation team from Indo-Pacific region for the project “Foreign Influence on India’s Election” facilitated by Doublethink Lab, a Taiwan based Civil Society. Their work focuses on researching malign Chinese influence operations and disinformation campaigns and their impacts via digital tools and methodologies. This report aims to highlight the various techniques employed by Chinese disinformation propagandists during Indian Lok Sabha 2024 elections, as well its impact across the platform. The Chinese came up with a malicious misinformation agenda on social media aimed to capitulate Indian netzines.
Understanding FIMI
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) refers to the deliberate spread of misleading or harmful information, often by state or non-state actors, with the intent to disrupt social values and political systems. FIMI operates in a legal grey area, using ambiguous and manipulative tactics to polarize societies and erode trust. Techniques like narrative distortion, discrediting facts, and artificial amplification are deployed in a coordinated manner. FIMI can escalate social divisions, provoke civic unrest, and even subvert states. Particularly around elections, it seeks to manipulate public opinion and question the legitimacy of democratic processes.
Chapter -2
Chinese Interest
Our report covers issues they picked up for spreading unfounded, unsubstantiated and misleading information. The three major issues in the report are heatwave in India, Brahmos missile sold to Philippines and border clash.
Why are the Chinese meddling in Indian elections and standing to gain from it? The answer is multi-fold. India as of 2023, ranks at 5th and China on 2nd in terms of economy size. However, India’s GDP growth exceeded China’s annually for the past few years, with India’s growth averaging over 7.5 per cent in 2023, while China’s is 5.2 per cent. India’s GDP is also expected to reach 7 per cent by 2026, while China is expected to reach 4.6 per cent. The IMF projects China’s 2024 growth at 4.6 per cent, declining towards 3.5 per cent in 2028. India’s diplomatic prowess in recent times have exceeded expectations and today stands as an self-reliant nation focused on self-help (Morgenthau, 1948) with its distinct and self-directed foreign policy strategy. It does not belong to any camp and carved out space for itself and other countries of global south.
As of 2024, India stands at a very sensitive position as many of its neighbours have departed from a democratic setup, this situation creates a hostile and uncertain environment for India. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism of two fronts (Pakistan and Bangladesh) and lurking covetous expansionist dragon over its head makes for the least favourable neighbours India could wish for.
Chapter -3
Analysing the TTPs of Chinese FIMI attack
Amidst the mount of disinformation on social media sites (here “X”), our report findings try to uncover the Chinese techniques, tactics and practices (TTP). Unwrap their intentions for meddling in the India elections and finally unearth their agendas of propaganda for short term and long term benefits.
During the election we saw Chinese interference around many issues i.e., creating caste divide, border related issues, heatwaves, trust issues between India-USA, human right issues, democracy in danger, BrahMos missile issue.
In our analysis, we have focused on disinformation and propaganda around three topic and we have covered the disinformation on X and the groups disseminating content around these tree topics.
The modus operandi:
● A false narrative or slightly twisted narrative around a certain topic is posted by Chinese state-controlled media
● Around that content same tweets/posts with fake news are circulated in the Indian Cyberspace by some China backed X accounts.
● These big accounts with blue tick, which are known perpetrators of Chinese propaganda like @thinking_panda @carlZha @zhao_dashuai will post some fake news/ old news or disinformation printed in some Chinese digital print media. [1,2,3]
● The posts from these accounts were then retweeted or liked by relatively small and new accounts to further disseminate these tweets by increasing the engagement..
● Sometime the dissemination accounts for different topics also turns out to be the same.
Narrative Manipulation by Chinese Coordinated Forces
Border issue:
Following the Galwan Valley clash on June 15th, Chinese media and bots swiftly launched a campaign to malign the Indian Army, crafting a narrative aimed at undermining its credibility. This disinformation wasn’t confined to social media platforms like ‘X’ but also extended to their news outlets, creating a coordinated effort to tarnish India’s military image. In a bid to maintain stealth, the Chinese media focused on issues already in the public eye, allowing them to manipulate the narrative without drawing direct blame. By using grey zone tactics, they avoided overtly villainous appearances while pushing disinformation through fake news and bot-driven propaganda, amplifying their reach across the digital space.
In our report we specifically covered the border clash in detail. A sensitive topic for any country, Chinese picked up the border clash issue to question the national integrity and challenge authority of India. Various scholars on nationalism have viewed military as an integral part of promoting national identity. Anthony D. Smith and Ernst Geller highlight the importance of the symbols associated with military and state institutions such as army in securing national cohesion. Putting out a fictitious narrative to build a factious group in India.
The network graphs represent tweets posted by pro-Chinese accounts on the border issue. Each node in the graph corresponds to a tweet, identified by its tweet ID. Additionally, there are nodes representing users who have retweeted multiple tweets on the issue; these nodes are linked to the corresponding tweets they have shared. Notably, users who have only retweeted a single tweet have been filtered out.
Heatwave:
The election season saw sudden surge in the use of the meaning phrases linking India’s natural geographical conditions to support a narrative suiting, the Chinese agenda that pushed along the lines of presenting India as an extremely poverty stricken nation. The misleading headlines claiming preposterous temperatures in India, constantly comparing India and China on the basis of air-conditioning infrastructure and the most outrageous claim of claiming to be superior in terms of geography. The fallacious argument of being geographical exceptionalism and chauvinism was regularly tweeted and retweeted during the elections in India.
The network graphs have the tweets on X posted by pro-Chinese accounts on heatwave issue, these nodes are denoted by the tweet id, and there are nodes which shows the username, these are users which retweet multiple such posts, to which there linked to. Here, we have filtered any users which have retweeted only single tweet.
Brahmos missile issue:
Out of the three major issues affecting these elections and internal to-country sentiments were the heatwaves and border issues, which targeted the current government’s policies. The BrahMos missile issue was to create a sense of disbelief among international communities against India through a set of false beliefs that are dividing democratic allies and degrading India’s technological advancements. An example of this was the narrative that the BrahMos missile sales from India to the Philippines have been discredited by false claims, alleging the missiles were found to be vulnerable to explosion during the test stages, missing targets and similar disinformation campaigns.
On the contrary, as cited in many reports, China’s arms exports have declined sharply due to inferior quality, substandard performance and malfunctions. Alexander Vuving, professor at Daniel K Inouye Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies, said China-made weapons are not just technologically inferior, they also remain untested on the battlefield. While the fact remains that none of the India-exported artillery has ever malfunctioned, fake videos and memes were widely shared on X(formerly Twitter) and TikTok, which remain in use in the Philippines to portray that India cheated the Philippines. The fact is BrahMos is the world’s fastest, accurate and deadly supersonic cruise missile which is a huge concern for China. As for the Chinese, they don’t have any supersonic cruise missile which can match the calibre of BrahMos. Other similar narratives were aimed at pre-emptively harming future cooperation, such as the possible sale of the Brahmos to Vietnam. As per the statement by the Director General of BrahMos, Atul Rane, India will export $3 billion of the BrahMos missile by 2026, as more than 12 countries are interested in the deal.
The study found narratives aimed at dividing partnerships between India, Taiwan, and India and the U.S., respectively. Given that the ruling government in India prioritises its relations with the U.S., Taiwan and partners in Southeast Asia, attempts to divide through disinformation were observed to be particularly strong.
The network graphs display tweets on X related to the BrahMos missile issue, posted by pro-Chinese accounts. Each tweet is represented as a node, labelled with its tweet ID. There are also nodes representing users who have retweeted multiple tweets, with links connecting them to the tweets they have shared. Users who have only retweeted a single tweet have been filtered out. The colour palette on the right indicates the strength of connections, with colours ranging from minimum to maximum as you move from bottom to top.
Chapter -4
Data Based Analysis of Coordinated attack on X
Overall Network Graph for the tree topics:
The below is the main network graph for all the three topics combined, which is made by pulling retweets (Rts) for all of 37 tweets, the tweets had a total of 2148 unique retweeters (which were able to collect). The nodes at the outer circle are tweets which have single or non-connected child nodes, (here main nodes are tweets and child nodes are retweets) we have focussed on the central part the closed network.
To avoid cluttering we have not shown single child nodes or non-connected child nodes. In the network graphs, there are nodes which shows tweet id and nodes which shows username which are retweeting the tweets, the node which has multiple common retweeters will have a lighter colour as shown on the axis on the right.
Chapter -5
The common dissemination network
We have analysed the retweet networks (network of accounts which retweet topics from the narrative creator, i.e., the originator accounts in this case) for all these three topics:
Findings for these retweet networks:
● There are common people who were retweeting tweets from certain topics — i.e., there were a bunch of accounts which were reposting tweets on Border issues and similarly some set of accounts were doing the same for heatwave and BrahMos missile issue. The total counts of account involved in this retweet network was 2148.
But attention was drawn to 91 accounts that retweeted posts from multiple topics, engaging with at least two out of three, and sometimes all. Sample of the account names and instances of their occurrence is mentioned below:
The above 91 accounts showed perfect bot behaviour and these bots only had one job retweet, most of these accounts did even do a single tweet (we analysed the last 300 posts on the profile of these 91 accounts). Below bar graphs shows retweet vs normal tweet comparison for latest 300 posts analysed for each of the user:
As, we can see above most of the account have 0 posts of their own, which means they were either only retweeting or replying to accounts of influencers or big accounts.
We also analysed if the accounts for retweeting pattern of these accounts, i.e., weekday vs weekend post.
Findings: 17/91 accounts were posting only over weekend, moonlighting! #Thesecondjob
Chapter -6
The Originators
We analysed some of the perpetrator accounts as well, they all had a pattern:
We found that these accounts did a large numbers of tweets per day, the tweet frequency varied from 54 per day to ~20 per day. We analysed tweets from these accounts across multiple timelines and since BeijingDai has the lowest frequency, we got most tweets for this account.
These accounts posted around certain time. See example below:
Patterns:
1. High Tweet frequency over a large period of time
2. Most of the tweets between ~25% to 50% from these accounts were around China (praising them or defending them)
3. Most of the Tweets were done around a certain time., paid/office hours
The above graph depicts the time(GMT) at which BeijingDai tweets. The maximum tweets are between 8 am and 12 pm and then 4pm to 8pm(Beijing Time), which looks like an office timing.
The above graph shows BejingDai’s tweets on during the year 2024 and out of 4013 total tweets from this account 1739 tweets mentions China in appreciation or defending China’s stance on any issue. #Believers
Note: In the post creation graph the numbers at the top right corner shows, Posts with China or Chinese Keyword/Total posts during the duration.
Similar pattern for other originator accounts:
Thinking_panda:
Megafor70551450:
dabowagaga:
Tianhuo_7:
FeiyanXie:
Chapter -7
Analysing the unmeasurable impact- Infowar:
Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP) of Chinese Infowar in Indian Election:
>> China cherry picked topics, which were already floating in Indian cyberspace.
For example the main topic of our report the border clash issue, it was already in talk in Indian media after the Galwan issue and Election Commission (EC) also issues notice this being misused in Indian election. Or let be the topic of heatwave, since at that time of year, India faces extreme temp. and heatwave but Chinese state sponsored players, created disinformation around the issue exaggerating the situation in India
>> Planting fake news around the topic already in discussion.
First the Chinese Media starts a grey propaganda around the topic
State sponsored actors on social media take parts of this posts to create a false narrative and post in on social media
The dissemination network of bot accounts (CIB accounts) reposts and reply on these posts to increase the reach
Since, the topics are already a topic of discussion, the Chinses propaganda army just plant in some false narrative around this topic, this makes the users actually believe or at least start considering the fake news planted by Chinese media — A classic example of Infowar
>> Once these narratives become mainstream in in cyberspace it becomes really difficult to differentiate them, since they get hidden in loads of information around the topic- This beneficial for China because neither the govt. agencies nor researchers are able to map the exact impact of these narrative manipulation
One of the main reasons for choosing this TTP is to make the impact of this Infowar unmeasurable for the target state. — “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It — Peter Drucker” and neither can you act upon it.
Who is the target & Why:
China always targets countries which it feels threatened from be it India, Japan, USA, UK, Taiwan, Malaysia or Philippines.
· China face challenges from these countries many be in export, import of goods and services.
· These countries highlight the threat that China poses to the world may it be through BRI or illegal occupation in the south China sea.
This attempt to malign the result of Indian election was no different but the concern or the fear is, these Chinese state sponsored actors getting successful in their attempt. Below we have mentioned the criteria for their success:
⮚ Planting false narratives in Indian social media space
⮚ Indian influencers picking up these topics as topic of ‘concern’
⮚ Indian public retweeting posts from these so-called influencers
⮚ These issues become a topic of discussion in Indian cyberspace may it be on social media, digital print media or newsrooms
This happened in India as well, we analysed a very small network where Indian accounts did pick this topic up and we can see from there retweet pattern that there are no common rt network and real people are falling prey to the propaganda.
Chapter -8
Conclusion:
The 2024 Indian elections unfolded like a grand theatrical performance, capturing the world’s attention, especially China’s. But China didn’t just watch from the side lines — it actively meddled, using platforms like ‘X’ to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion.
The campaign’s broader objective was to affect the results of Indian elections and weaken India’s diplomatic ties with countries like the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, Philippines etc. by spreading disinformation and painting a distorted picture of the world’s largest democracy. China sought to exploit India’s domestic issues during the election season, planting false narratives about Border issues, Heatwaves or International Relations to discredit the government’s policies. Chinese-sponsored media initiated grey propaganda, while state-backed actors and bot accounts amplified these fake stories, making them go viral in Indian social media.
The study presents a classic case of Infowar, a type of warfare that aims at controlling and manipulating the narrative to gain an advantage over an opponent. In this case, the Chinese state-sponsored media & accounts targeted key issues relevant to India’s 2024 elections — border disputes, extreme weather conditions, and defence capabilities — capitalizing on sensitive topics to generate widespread misinformation.
By employing a network of automated or semi-automated accounts, China was able to flood social media platforms with false narratives, giving the appearance of organic support while, in reality, amplifying state-sponsored disinformation and all backed by the master plan of Chinese state to keep the impact unmeasurable.
This investigation underlines the complexity of modern information warfare, where bots and orchestrated social media activity play a critical role in shaping public perception.
We aim to make people aware about the Infowar ahead of us and the ways in which China is already taking advantage of this.
Credits:
Special Thanks to Dr. Sriparna Pathak for her inputs & research contributions.
Thanks to Kashish Kunden for her contribution in writing and research.
Our Partner for this Project are DoubleThink Lab (DTL) and we would like to thank them for getting the researchers from across the globe on a common platform, and for helping us with this elaborated research work. For more reports related to Chinese Interference on Indian Elections (published by other partners working on this project), please visit DTL’s medium page.
About ThinkFi:
We develop State of the art tools to gather and analyse data from open sources (OSINT) to detect misinformation, propaganda and disinformation in the cyberspace. Our products are powered by our research in AI and ML.
Website: https://thinkfi.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThinkFi_net
Contact: thinkfi.net@gmail.com
