By Nivedita Niranjankumar In a reel posted on Paltu Paltan, an Instagram account mocking opposition parties with 1 lakh 64 thousand followers, two Muslim men tell a Hindu man that if Congress comes to power, they will get half of his assets. One of the actors, playing a Muslim man, is 15-year-old Ashish Pandey from Bihar. Created in June 2022, Paltu Paltan has over 3000 posts, only following right wing and official Bharatiya Janata Party accounts with each reel garnering a little less than 10,000 likes. Pandey, who just appeared for his 10th standard exams, is part of a group called MVS Films,...
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By Adnan Bhat Rishabh Singh has lost over 50,000 rupees on illegal betting websites since the start of the Indian Premier League (IPL) last month. Although it's not a big amount for the 35-year-old from New Delhi, who runs a real estate business, it is also not his first time losing money on such websites. Singh has been betting on these websites for over two years. "When I started betting, I won almost 3 lakh rupees in the first month. Then it didn't go so well. I ended up burning 2 lakhs from my own pocket," he told Decode. Despite the financial setbacks, Singh hasn't lost his appetite to be...
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By Vipul Kumar In July 2023, Himachal Pradesh and parts of Uttarakhand were reeling under severe floods. Tanushree Pandey - a journalist from Delhi, was in the field to report from these two ecologically-sensitive North Indian states that are increasingly in the crosshairs of climate change. Tanushree was stranded on the outskirts of Delhi held up by an unregulated Kanwar Yatra on the highway. The Kanwar Yatra is an annual pilgrimage where, mostly young Hindu men who are devotees of the Hindu god Shiva, carry water from the river Ganges and other shrines. A few hours after being stuck, Tanushr...
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By Karen Rebelo Ira Sharma describes herself on Instagram in three short sentences. ‘A normal girl’; ‘loves bgms* and songs’ and ‘Not real (alien)’. The last sentence in her bio is ironically accurate. That’s because Ira Sharma, who has over 2,60,000 followers on Instagram, is not real. The handle me_ira.sharma, created in November 2023, is a deepfake influencer made by stealing reels of young Indian women on the Meta-owned platform and morphing those videos using face swap technology. Deepfake influencers are a small but growing subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or virtual influencers th...
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By Akshit chawla On March 8, 2024, a month before the Lok Sabha Election, National Creators Awards were handed out to 23 creators in 20 categories by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These awards aim torecognise creators doing exceptional work in different fields, such as social change, culture, education, and more. At the awards ceremony, the prime minister said, “In the next few days, Lok Sabha elections will be happening – do not think that today’s event is being organised because of that”. While PM Modi categorically said that the purpose of the awards has nothing to do with the elections, it...
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By prachi sibal On a busy work day, Bengaluru-based copywriter Aishhwariya Subramanian received a message from a friend. She was a fitness influencer and often got sponsorship deals from brands. So, when she asked Subramanian to vote in a contest, she was part of, there seemed no need to be alarmed. Except, when Subramanian, distractedly clicked on the link, her Instagram account was hacked within seconds. Despite numerous attempts, she could not use her password to log in to her account. With Mumbai-based Ranjani Iyengar, wedding card designer and founder, Pink Whistle Man, the story was simi...
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By Kashif Kakvi Bhopal — June 2020 was an unforgettable month for Veer Sharma, an Indore-basedsocial media influencer. When the Indian government banned the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, the 29-year-old lost his 7 million followers overnight. “He cried for days after TikTok got banned in India,” said Veer Sharma’s sister Preeti Mishra (39). “He didn’t leave home for almost a month. He lost fame and money overnight,” she added. Exactly three years later, in June 2023, Veer shared a photo and a reel on Instagram of his meeting with the then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Ch...
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By Archis Chowdhury 21-year-old Dhiraj Takri from Odisha is no Shashi Tharoor. He did not learn much English in school, and he did not pass 12th grade. But he has over a million followers on Instagram, where he teaches how to speak English the native way. "If you want to learn to speak English really fast, then forget the grammar. Forget it man!" he says with an American accent, in an Instagram reel that has over 12.8 million views. It started off as a small project — teach English to others in the same way he has taught himself. But his unconventional approach to teaching 'connected speech', ...
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By Shantasree Sarkar On 22 January, as the Prime Minister along with several guests attended the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, 29-year-old Ashish Mishra was there too, as a volunteer of the media management department. His post of a video of the Ram idol on Instagram has garnered over 2 million views now. Ashish Mishra found instant online fame when he posted the first picture of Garbh Griha (sanctum sanctorum) of Ram Mandir online in March 2023 after getting a glimpse of it with permission from the Ram Janambhoomi trust. His picture of a brick with “Jai Shri Ram” written on it wa...
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By Karen Rebelo Fake ads using artificial intelligence voice cloning technology are being promoted on Meta’s social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and messaging app Messenger to its users in India. Decode found numerous such fake ads peddling everything from get-rich quick schemes, betting apps, trading platforms to diabetes drugs, in the Meta Ad Library - a publicly accessible database to study political ads that was created in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We found 150 such URLs, however, restrictions around the visibility of these ads and repetition of ident...
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