Why Does a 10-Day-Old Twitter Thread Look So Much Like the ‘Toolkit’? – By Pratik Sinha
On May 18, the top brass of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the opposition Congress of conspiring a nefarious plan to gain political capital from the pandemic. The plan, documented in a ‘toolkit’, included sullying the image of the country, using COVID volunteerism as a PR and marketing activity and using phrases like “Modi strain” to shame the Prime Minister. In an article published on May 19, Alt News explained how the toolkit was created on a forged letterhead.
In this investigation, we will reveal how a pro-BJP Twitter handle talked about a ‘new toolkit’ 10 days before the ‘toolkit’ attributed to Congress was made public by BJP leaders.
….On May 21, Twitter marked the ‘toolkit’ screenshots shared by multiple BJP leaders, members and sympathisers as ‘manipulated media’.
