Bots and Indian TV push fake news about Canada in wake of Hindu temple clashes

A wave of misinformation about Canadian institutions is being amplified by suspected bot accounts on social media and by pro-Modi news outlets in India, raising concerns it could imperil relations between Sikhs and Hindus in Canada. 

CBC News reviewed hundreds of posts on X and dozens of hours of footage streamed on YouTube in the days before and after clashes outside Hindu temples in Surrey, B.C., and Brampton, Ont., in November.

The analysis identified several posts containing misleading and inflammatory comments about the Khalistan movement — which advocates for an independent state for Sikhs — and Sikh Canadians in general that were recirculated by suspicious accounts. 

Some of these claims were then repeated on Indian media outlets sympathetic to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A parallel analysis of pro-Khalistan accounts also revealed numerous unverified claims, but only marginal amplification by suspected bots.

Even before last month’s clashes, the media monitoring unit at Global Affairs Canada had reported “Modi-aligned” media outlets in India were pushing “often heated” narratives claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is beholden to Khalistani extremists.

The steadfast opposition to the Khalistan movement is an integral part of a Hindu nationalist ideology the Modi government has been pushing both domestically and abroad, said Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

“The violence of those demonstrations [in Brampton and Surrey] suggests that that agenda has been pushed in [Canada] a good deal more than any of us realized,” Elcock said. 

Sense of insecurity following clashes

Sikh separatists have been demonstrating outside consular events at Hindu temples since Trudeau alleged the Indian government was involved in the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan activist, in Surrey.

These demonstrations, though small, are often held near the temple entrance and can feature provocative slogans, such as “Who supports Nijjar’s killers: Hindu temple.”

Last month, demonstrations in Surrey and Brampton were met by counter-protesters. A series of confrontations ensued over a 48-hour period, resulting in several arrests and condemnation from politicians across the spectrum.

“Virtually everybody who has been here for 10, 15 or 20 years were of the view that they never had to confront such a situation,” said Balwinder Singh, who hosts a Punjabi-language call-in radio show from the basement of his home in Brampton. 

“They never thought …  they would feel unsafe in Canada.”

In the days following the demonstrations, social media was awash in unverified claims about retaliatory violence, government infiltration and police corruption.

CBC News examined the activity of six accounts on X during the first two weeks of November: three belonging to prominent Canadian influencers often critical of the Khalistan movement and three belonging to prominent Canadian advocates of the Khalistani cause.

Using publicly available data, CBC News counted the number of times a given post was reposted by an account that had the characteristics of a bot. The Digital Forensic Research Lab at the D.C.-based Atlantic Council defines a suspicious account as one that posts more than 72 times per day.

This type of analysis does not determine who is controlling the bots or if they are co-ordinating with each other.

The pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample have posted unverified claims about Indian diplomats using places of worship to build a spy network. But there was little evidence these posts were being boosted in a significant way by suspected bots.

The account belonging to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a leading Khalistan advocate, only has 3,600 followers. CBC News detected 13 suspected bots pushing his content in early November; content from the two other pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample was amplified by fewer than 10 bots.  

Suspected bot accounts push misinformation

Posts by critics of the Khalistan movement, on the other hand, showed evidence of significant amplification by suspected bots.

Two of the accounts received retweets from more than 1,000 different suspected bots, while the third had more than 500.

Daniel Bordman, a Toronto-based journalist with a right-wing publication called The National Telegraph who has 70,000 followers on X, had the most bot engagement in our sample, receiving nearly 6,000 retweets from nearly 1,800 suspicious accounts when we expanded the analysis to include the whole month of November.

In at least two instances, these suspected bots amplified misleading information posted by Bordman.

On Nov. 13, for example, Bordman posted a video of a gathering in Surrey in which yellow Khalistan flags can be seen. 

“Khalistanis march around Surrey BC and claim ‘we are the owners of Canada’ and ‘white people should go back to Europe and Israel,'” Bordman wrote, adding an offensive term and implying Khalistanis shape Canadian foreign policy. 

Bordman’s post has received nearly 1.5 million views and 16,000 likes and has been reposted more than 5,000 times. CBC News found that, as of last week, 469 of those reposts were from suspected bot accounts.

Bordman’s post was cited in reports of the incident by NDTV, one of India’s most popular television networks, and by Mint, a Delhi-based financial publication. Other major Indian media outlets covered the incident as well.

But contrary to Bordman’s description, the video shows Sikhs singing hymns during a processional religious ceremony called Nagar Kirtan.

The voice in the original video saying “we are the owners of Canada” and “white people should go back to Europe and Israel” belongs to Inderjit Singh Jaswal, a local vlogger who livestreamed the ceremony. 

In a Nov. 17 Instagram post, Jaswal said he is not “Khalistani” and that his statements in the video were directed at people who were making racist comments in the livestream chat.

“Thousands of racist people came there [in the comment section] and were abusing our gods, our culture, our values,” he said in the video, while displaying the racist comments he received during the livestream. 

“Why did Daniel [Bordman] hide the comments? I was replying to racist people,” Jaswal says in his video. He posted a separate video in Punjabi offering a similar explanation. 

Bordman later appeared on a podcast to discuss Jaswal’s explanation. He ridiculed and mimicked Jaswal’s accent and called him a “mentally deficient Khalistani.” 

In another post, boosted by more than 370 suspected bot accounts, Bordman claimed a video of two Surrey police officers performing Gatka, a Sikh martial art, at a religious festival showed “Khalistani cops preparing for the next attack on a Hindu temple in Surrey BC.”

Bordman added: “Can we trust these two to be honest arbitrators of justice?”

A day later, NewsXLive, a pro-Modi news channel based in Delhi, ran a segment about the Surrey video, asking if the officers “can be trusted as impartial enforcers of justice.”

Pro-Modi media has size advantage, Ottawa says 

Press freedom in India has dropped significantly since Modi took power in 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.

Many of the country’s largest media outlets are owned and operated by Modi loyalists, and their coverage is often sympathetic to the government’s goals, said Reporters Without Borders in a 2023 report.

The size of their audience, which includes diaspora communities, means Modi-aligned outlets have a “distinct advantage in amplifying negative narratives about Canada,” Global Affairs Canada said in a September report.

Bordman has given multiple interviews to Indian media over the past year, including ANI, known for its pro-Modi slant and for spreading misinformation.

In an interview with CBC News, Bordman said some of those media appearances were paid, but he declined to specify which ones. 

“I’d never take money from the Indian government,” he said.

Bordman said it was not unexpected that bots would repost some of his content, given the size of his following on X. 

“Do some bots retweet me? Sure,” he said. “But I don’t think bots are that significant in the outreach they have.”

‘The new normal’ 

The presence of artificial social media activity in online discussions of Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada is not novel. 

Researchers with the Media Ecosystem Observatory, based at McGill University in Montreal, detected the remnants of a bot farm that issued identical anti-Canada messages in mid-October, just after the RCMP linked agents of the Indian government to homicides and other acts of violence in Canada.

Earlier this year, the social media company Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) announced it had dismantled a cluster of fake accounts behind a fictitious pro-Sikh activist movement called Operation K.

The company said the network running the accounts was based in China, and that the campaign was directed at Sikhs around the world, including in Canada. 

“This is the new normal,” said Aengus Bridgman, who heads the Media Ecosystem Observatory, about the proliferation of bot activity on sites like X. 

He said policy-makers and social media users should expect some degree of manipulation “to occur with every issue.”

As Singh wrapped up another broadcast of his radio show Sargam (which means harmony in both Punjab and Hindi), he said he was worried the flow of misinformation is driving a wedge between two communities that once co-existed peacefully.

“A narrative has been created” that aims to make Hindus and Sikhs fear each other, he said. 

“I think that is very, very dangerous.”