Facebook and Twitter are getting sucked into India-Pak information battle

With a combined population of 1.5 billion, India and Pakistan are hot growth markets for Facebook and Twitter.

Pakistani social media campaigner Hanzala Tayyab leads about 300 ultra-nationalist cyber warriors fighting an internet war with arch-foe India, in a battle that is increasingly sucking in global tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook.

Tayyab, 24, spends his days on Facebook and encrypted WhatsApp chatrooms organising members of his Pakistan Cyber Force group to promote anti-India content and make it go viral, including on Twitter where he has more than 50,000 followers.

That ranges from highlighting alleged Indian human rights abuses to lionizing insurgents battling Indian security forces in Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan region at the heart of historic tensions between Pakistan and India.

Tayyab’s job became harder on Monday when the Pakistan Cyber Force’s Facebook account was taken down, one of 103 Pakistani accounts the social media giant said it had deleted because of “inauthentic behaviour” and spamming. Some Indian nationalist accounts have also been suspended in recent weeks.

Portraying himself as an online combatant defending Pakistan from India’s attempts to destabilise his country, Tayyab plans to continue playing his role in the broader information war being fought between the nuclear-armed foes.

“We are countering the Indian narrative through social media, we are countering the enemies of Pakistan,” Tayyab told Reuters in the capital Islamabad.

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With a combined population of 1.5 billion, India and Pakistan are hot growth markets for Facebook and Twitter, say analysts.

But with many rival ultra-nationalist and extremist groups in the region using Facebook and Twitter platforms to advance their political agenda, both companies face accusations of bias whenever they suspend accounts.

Facebook has been buffeted by controversies across the globe in recent years, including for not stopping the use of fake accounts to try to sway public opinion in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and for not acting to stamp out hate speech on its platform that was fuelling ethnic violence in Myanmar.

India deports second group of Rohingyas to Myanmar; travel permits awaited

The government estimates that 40,000 Rohingya live in India in camps across the country.

Indian police on Thursday took a Rohingya Muslim family of five to the border by bus, readying to deport them to neighbouring Myanmar as the second such group expelled in four months during a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

India's Hindu nationalist government regards the Rohingya as illegal aliens and a security risk. It has ordered that tens of thousands of the community, who live in small settlements and slums, be identified and repatriated.

The husband, wife and three children comprising the family set to be expelled on Thursday had been arrested and jailed in northeastern Assam state in 2014 for entering India without valid documents, police said.

"These five people are now at the border gate in the adjoining Manipur state and we are waiting for Myanmar officials to hand them over formally," Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, Assam's additional director general of police, told Reuters.

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Jails in Assam held 20 more Myanmar nationals, all arrested for illegal entry, he added. But it was not immediately clear if all were Rohingya, a largely stateless Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

"We shall send them back to Myanmar once we get their travel permits from that country," Mahanta said. "Most of them sneaked into India in search of a livelihood."

India's first deportation of seven Rohingya men to Myanmar in October sparked fears of further repatriations among those sheltering in its refugee camps, and concern that those returned faced the risk of abuse at the hands of Myanmar authorities.

There has been no word on the fate of the deported men.

The government estimates that 40,000 Rohingya live in India in camps across the country, including the capital, New Delhi, having arrived over the years after fleeing violence and persecution in Myanmar, which denies them citizenship.

In August, a United Nations report accused the Myanmar military of committing mass killings and rapes on the Rohingya with "genocidal intent" in 2017 in an operation that drove more than 700,000 of them to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Myanmar has denied the charges, saying its military launched a counter-insurgency operation after attacks on security posts by Muslim militants in August last year.

Business Standard