Spamming Twitter with duplicate tweets is a violation of Twitter’s rules, which say that users aren’t permitted to “post multiple updates to a trending or popular topic with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic to drive traffic or attention to unrelated accounts, products, services, or initiatives.” A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “Any use of automation to game Trending Topics is in violation of the Twitter Rules, and we have had measures in place to address this since the spring of 2014.” Still, that isn’t stopping campaigns spreading political propaganda from trending in India.

Getting political propaganda to trend on Twitter is an effective way to influence the public. “Twitter is where Indian politics now happens, and where opinions are formed, and where the agenda is set,” said Sinha. “Twitter is where the most important people in India’s politics and media are.”

Twitter is facing serious scrutiny in the United States over revelations that Russian state-linked trolls exploited the platform to sow discord in American politics. In the US, as a result, Twitter is making attempts to be more transparent about promoted tweets. But in India, Twitter’s fastest growing market, the company seems to be turning a blind eye to politically-motivated hijacking of the trending column through targeted campaigns.

These political hashtag campaigns now trend so frequently on Twitter in India that websites like Sinha’s Alt News and Twitter accounts like @trollabhakt have taken it upon themselves to track the phenomenon. @trollabhakt is an anonymous user who described himself to BuzzFeed News as a techie “who is disgusted by all these fake trends, and who doesn’t support [n]or is a member of any political party”. He uses a custom Python script to collect tweets from Twitter’s API for data that he then collates using spreadsheets in order to spot organised hashtag campaigns. BuzzFeed News used some of @trollabhakt’s data in its analysis.

Overwhelming Twitter’s trending topics algorithm to create a trend on demand isn’t new. It’s the same trick that the notorious internet forum 4chan used back in 2009 to flood Twitter with the decidedly NSFW #gorillapenis hashtag by creating fake Twitter accounts that used it in thousands of tweets to make it trend. 4chan called the project “Operation Shitter” and posted a detailed list of instructions to make a hashtag trend – similar to the the document that Sinha found. Twitter manually removed #gorillapenis hashtag from its trending column, but tweets with the hashtag are still visible.



Earlier this year, trolls used similar tactics to orchestrate a harassment campaign against Dhanya Rajendran, the editor of an Indian news website, by flooding the platform with the hashtag #PublicityBeepDhanya and getting it to trend. Twitter manually removed the trend only after Rajendran called people at the company who she knew personally.