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The wave of misinformation about Canadian institutions has been fueled by alleged bot accounts on social media and pro-Modi news outlets in India, raising concerns that it could threaten relations between Sikhs and Hindus in Canada.
CBC News reviewed hundreds of posts on Xu and dozens of hours of footage that aired 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 that contained misleading and inflammatory comments about the Khalistan movement — which advocates for an independent state for Sikhs — and Sikh Canadians in general, which were circulated by suspicious accounts.
Some of these claims were then repeated in the Indian media, which is 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, Canada’s global affairs department’s media monitoring unit reported that “Modi-aligned” media in India were pushing “often vitriolic” narratives claiming that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was beholden to Khalistani extremists.
Strong opposition to the Khalistan movement is an integral part of the Hindu nationalist ideology that the Modi government is pushing at home and abroad, said Ward Elcock, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
“The violence of those protests (in Brampton and Surrey) suggests that this agenda is being pushed in (Canada) much more than any of us realized,” Elcock said.
Feeling insecure after a conflict
Sikh separatists have been demonstrating outside consular events at Hindu temples since Trudeau claimed the Indian government was involved in the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistani activist, in Surrey.
These demonstrations, although small, are often held near temple entrances and may feature provocative slogans, such as “Who supports Nijjar’s killers: Hindu temple.”
Last month, demonstrators in Surrey and Brampton were met by counter-protesters. A series of clashes ensued over a 48-hour period, resulting in several arrests and convictions of politicians across the spectrum.
“Almost everyone who’s been here 10, 15 or 20 years thinks they’ve never had to deal with that,” said Balwinder Singh, who hosts a Punjabi-language radio show from the basement of his Brampton home.
“They never thought … that they would feel unsafe in Canada.”
In the days following the protests, social media was awash with unverified claims of revenge violence, government infiltration and police corruption.
CBC News examined the activity of six X accounts during the first two weeks of November: three belonging to prominent Canadian influencers who have often criticized the Khalistan movement and three belonging to prominent Canadian supporters of the Khalistan movement.
Using publicly available data, CBC News counted the number of times a particular post was reposted by an account with bot characteristics. The Atlantic Council’s DC-based Digital Forensics Lab defines a suspicious account as one that posts more than 72 times a day.
This type of analysis does not determine who controls the bots or whether they coordinate with each other.
The pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample posted unverified claims about Indian diplomats using places of worship to build a spy network. But there was little evidence that those posts were significantly boosted by suspicious bots.
An account belonging to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a leading Khalistan advocate, has only 3,600 followers. CBC News discovered 13 suspected bots pushing its content in early November; content from the other two pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample was amplified by less than 10 bots.
Suspicious bot accounts send misinformation
Posts by critics of the Khalistan movement, on the other hand, showed evidence of significant amplification by suspected bots.
Two accounts received retweets from more than 1,000 different suspicious bots, while a third had more than 500.
Daniel Bordman, a Toronto journalist with a right-wing publication called The National Telegraph who has 70,000 followers on X, had the highest bot engagement in our sample, receiving nearly 6,000 retweets from nearly 1,800 suspicious accounts when we expanded the analysis to include the entire month of November. .
Three men were arrested after a series of violent demonstrations outside a Toronto-area Hindu temple and Sikh gurdwara over the weekend. Similar clashes occurred in Surrey, BC, and occurred during heightened tensions between Canada and India.
In at least two cases, these suspicious bots spread misinformation posted by Bordman.
For example, on November 13, Bordman posted a video of a rally in Surrey where yellow Khalistan flags can be seen.
“The Khalistani are marching around Surrey BC claiming ‘we own Canada’ and ‘white people should go back to Europe and Israel,'” Bordman wrote, adding offensive term and implying that the Khalistans shape Canadian foreign policy.
Bordman’s post received nearly 1.5 million views and 16,000 likes and was reposted more than 5,000 times. CBC News found that as of last week, 469 of those reposts were from suspicious bot accounts.
Bordman’s post was cited in reports of the incident by NDTV, one of India’s most popular television networks, and Mint, a Delhi-based financial publication. Other major Indian media also covered the incident.
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 own Canada” and “white people should go back to Europe and Israel” belongs to Inderjit Singh Jaswal, a local vlogger who live-streamed the ceremony.
In an Instagram post on November 17, Jaswal said he was not a “Khalistani” and that his statements in the video were aimed at people who made racist comments in the live chat.
“Thousands of racist people came there (in the comments section) and abused our gods, our culture, our values,” he said in the video, while showing the racist comments he received during the live stream.
“Why did Daniel (Bordman) hide the comments? I was responding to racist people,” Jaswal says in his video. He posted a separate video in Punjabi offering a similar explanation.
Bordman later appeared on the podcast to discuss Jaswal’s explanation. He mocked and imitated Jaswal’s accent and called him a “mentally deficient Khalistani”.
In another post, backed up by more than 370 suspicious bot accounts, Bordman claimed that a video of two Surrey police officers performing Gatka, a Sikh martial art, at a religious festival showed “Khalistan policemen preparing for the next attack on a Hindu temple in Surrey BC. “
Bordman added: “Can we trust these two to be honest arbiters of justice?”
A day later, VijestiXLiveA Delhi-based pro-Modi news channel aired a segment on the Surrey video, questioning whether police officers “can be trusted as impartial administrators of justice”.
Pro-Modi media has a size advantage, says Ottawa
Media freedom in India has declined significantly since Modi took power in 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
Many of the country’s biggest media houses are owned and operated by Modi loyalists, and their reporting is often sympathetic to the government’s goals, Reporters Without Borders said in a 2023 report.
The size of their audience, which includes diaspora communities, means the Modi-leaning media has a “clear 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 and disinformation spread.
In an interview with CBC News, Bordman said some of those media appearances were paid, but declined to specify which ones.
“I would never take money from the Indian government,” he said.
Bordman said it wasn’t unexpected that bots would repost some of his content, given the size of his X following.
“Are some bots retweeting me? Sure,” he said. “But I don’t think bots are that significant in the reach they have.”
‘The New Normal’
The presence of artificial social media activity in online discussions about Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada is not new.
Researchers at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, based at McGill University in Montreal, discovered the remains of a bot farm issuing identical messages against Canada in mid-October, just after the RCMP linked Indian government agents to the killings and other acts of violence in Canada.
India on Saturday formally protested the Canadian government’s claims that the country’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah ordered the targeting of Sikh activists inside Canada, calling it ‘absurd and baseless’. Read more: cbc.ca/1.7371969.
Earlier this year, social media company Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) announced dismantled a group of fake accounts behind a fictitious pro-Sikh activist movement called Operation K.
The company said the network running the accounts is based in China and that the campaign is targeting Sikhs around the world, including Canada.
“This is the new normal,” Aengus Bridgman, who runs the Media Ecosystem Observatory, said of the proliferation of bot activity on sites like X.
He said policymakers and social media users should expect some degree of manipulation “on every issue.”
While Singh was finishing another broadcast of his radio show For the guard (which means harmony in both Punjabi and Hindi), said he was concerned that the flow of misinformation was driving a wedge between two communities that once coexisted peacefully.
“A story has been created” to make Hindus and Sikhs fear each other, he said.
“I think it’s very, very dangerous.”
