The IT professionals who were interviewed by an India Today reporter.

"The medium is the message."

That's how celebrated Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan summed up the role of the media way back in the 1960s, propounding that the way information is circulated impacts people more than the information itself. His prophetic analysis dearly applies to social media.

As increasingly partisan politics turn to social sites across the world, an investigation by India Today has found out how vested interests can exploit Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp to manufacture outrage, unleash digital mobs and launch vilification campaigns against rivals.

Posing as a consultant for a fictitious political party, an India Today reporter dredged up rings of young IT professionals who can orchestrate malice and religious polarization in the virtual world no matter if it tears apart lives, careers and reputations in the real.

For over a week, the reporter visited several so-called IT solution-providers in Noida and Delhi, who readily offered their services to trigger false propaganda against opposing candidates in elections and potentially-dangerous hysteria via social media.

ORM: ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Faking slanderous material is one part of this ignominious social-media operation, deploying Internet researchers is another. Faking slanderous material is one part of this ignominious social-media operation, deploying Internet researchers is another.

Ranveer Kumar, a director at the Noida-based Vibgyor Technosystems, and his colleague shared their expertise in running destructive political tactics on networking sites.

"So, their image is to be destroyed.... It means damaging his ORM -- Online Reputation Management. This is a kind of negative campaign where someone's ORM is basically tarnished," said Kumar, whose company claims to be a leading Internet-marketing firm.

The ORM is a PR process for online makeover.

Essentially, the technique buries negative search results on Google and bumps up information that enhances the client's image.

But Kumar said he would use the same method inversely as he also offered to post scandalous content to malign rivals on social platforms.

"Basically, it's damaging his overall image, not just political. May be it involves posting a scandalous photo with a woman or a comment that hits his image directly. We don't know what that person is like but we have to portray him as a fraud, someone of a questionable character, etc, etc," he said.

"Will you be able to arrange (scandalous) photos?" asked the undercover journalist.

"That all will be arranged. It involves morphing, like replacing his... your... or my face. All of that," he replied.

Kumar said he would charge an additional fee for forging photos, which he described as "hard work."

Faking slanderous material is one part of this ignominious social-media operation, deploying Internet researchers is another, as the investigative journalist discovered.

Kumar would hire a team of Web researchers to dig out anything unfavourable about their targets and popularize that content, true or false, on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

Their public esteem would be marred without them ever possibly knowing who the authors of that spiteful offensive were.

IT'S ALL ABOUT PROXY SERVERS, IP ADDRESSES

IT professionals readily offered their services to trigger false propaganda against opposing candidates in elections and potentially-dangerous hysteria via social media. IT professionals readily offered their services to trigger false propaganda against opposing candidates in elections and potentially-dangerous hysteria via social media.

Kumar claimed his company would route this gambit through servers overseas, beyond the reach of law.

"No one should be identified. There's a full mechanism. It will be separate. That job will not be done from this office," he said.

"Proxy servers will be used. Right, Sir. IP addresses of those servers will keep changing every other day. It will be untraceable then."

The investigative reporter found out that the market was also flooded with experts who could doctor sensational clips for social dissemination.

Jatin Arora of Delhi's Scanf Solutions invoked the adage seeing is believing, when the undercover journalist met him.

Arora claimed he could fabricate footage to demonize competing candidates in elections.

"You know some videos are not genuine. But people believe in them because they see them. There are so many such videos. For example, I post a video about a fight with a (phony) caption that a person seen in this video belongs to the ruling party. This is how it happens," he said. "They (bogus videos) will be created, Sir. We'll do something, Sir. I am telling this to you again. I have disclosed only 10 percent of the things that can be done. Let's meet once or twice again."

But outsourcing such damage on social media doesn't come cheap.

The price could be downright obnoxious.

Executives of Noida-based DS Media Link quoted as high as up to Rs 10 crore for three months of positive publicity for 50 fictitious candidates and negative for their opponents.

"We are responsible for those 50 candidates. We can't neglect anything. It (the charge) will go up to eight to ten (crore). We'll manage everything, both positive and negative. We have no problem damaging (the rivals' reputation). We'll do whatever you say," said Swati Awasthi, a company official.

For many professionals in this industry, greed seemed to have trumped ethics.

At WebAppMate in New Delhi's Pitampura, consultant Ansh apparently had no problem participating in any dangerous communal gameplan scripted by politicians.

Give him any inflammable content and he says he'll spread it on social media.

"Just think this way that someone tore apart a sacred text. That video will be promoted. That's my job. It's not my job to tear a sacred text. There are two things here in (this) social media (strategy). You'll give us ideas to promote, and we will promote them. We will not give our own ideas," he remarked.

Company director Rohin Jain, sitting beside, then explained how videos of a potential act of desecration could be trended.

He would harness the collective power of all social platforms in order to popularize such incidents as hashtag-driven topics.

"That video has to be posted on various social media sites, not just Facebook or Twitter. There are several sites," Jain said.

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