Dadhi (Milind Karnad) 🇮🇳❤️❤️

An extraordinary investigation by Bangladesh’s leading newspaper, Prothom Alo, has exposed a Chinese influence operation in Dhaka. More than 150 Chinese streamers have been livestreaming on WeChat from the city’s slums for months, presenting the locations to their Chinese audiences as New Delhi, India. Prothom Alo investigated the activity, examined their Chinese-language broadcasts and had the translations verified by four Bangladeshis familiar with the language. The findings are quite revealing. The streamers were not merely misidentifying the location. They were portraying Indians as living in filthy, impoverished conditions, while describing the surroundings as New Delhi. One woman was even caught explicitly telling her viewers that she was showing them New Delhi while livestreaming from a neighbourhood in Dhaka. This is how information warfare and perception-shaping work. Footage from Bangladesh is being deliberately passed off as footage from India to manufacture negative perceptions of the country. A disturbing example of how anti-India narratives and hate campaigns are manufactured and amplified through social media.