Maverick politician Subramanian Swamy is well into his eighties. He is politically and intellectually an exhausted man. However, his impish and unparalleled knack for staying in the news still survives. He uses his characteristic and controversial abilities to rake up an issue and retreat himself to the background. With the advent of social media, his job has become easier and he has been using it to the hilt. He triggers a controversy knowing pretty well that the troll armies waiting on both sides of the aisle are always ready to pick up a fight.
Recently, Swamy made a senseless claim not unexpected of a senile mind rendered idle at this stage of his life. He claimed that the United States could blackmail Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the US government was allegedly in possession of some controversial and compromising pictures of the Prime Minister. Nothing can be more absurd and outrageous than such an allegation. Prime Minister Modi has maintained an immaculately neat and clean image in all respects. If he has got a cult following across the country, it is for his strong personal character and highest levels of integrity.
Swamy is a perennially and perpetually aggrieved man. He cannot stay friends with anyone for a long time. When the Bharatiya Janata Party stormed to power under Modi’s leadership in 2014, Swamy expected to be made the finance minister. He couldn’t make it. Till then he would never get tired of singing paeans to Prime Minister Modi. His grievance and personal grudge against Modi started since that day. He has been levelling such silly and baseless allegations from time to time. Nobody takes much note of it, not at least the government or the Prime Minister himself.
The latest claims about the Prime Minister that seeks to target his personal character, have been expectedly picked up by trolls belonging to opposition parties and they are mass circulating these. The “troll army” has already magnified and spread Swamy’s absurd claims on multiple social media platforms. In the age of artificial intelligence nothing is impossible. Anyone can generate any image or visual as is already being done quite frequently. Deep fakes are a paradoxical reality now.
Trolls are backed by particular and respective ecosystems owing allegiance to their groups/ organisations. Like now the troll army owing allegiance to the opposition parties is celebrating the “allegations” from Swamy, supposedly a BJP leader; earlier the trolls belonging to the ruling dispensation would do the same thing when Swamy would level similarly baseless and outrageous allegations against the opposition leaders, particularly Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
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It is not just the opposition parties alone that have their troll armies. The ruling BJP also has it. As soon as the “opposition trolls” start circulating Swamy’s allegations on multiple social media handles, the “ruling party trolls” jumped in with what Swamy had said about senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi in the past. Like the allegations against Modi are atrocious and absurd, so are they about Gandhi. These are so outrageous that it is difficult to imagine that these have come from a saner person and equally difficult to mention them here.
Although Swamy had levelled these allegations against Gandhi several years ago, the troll army dug these out and played his videos where he is purportedly speaking nonsense about the senior Congress leader. Since the “trolls” are an unguided and uncontrolled army, it is practically impossible to restrict or restrain them.
Both Prime Minister Modi as well as Sonia Gandhi are well-respected leaders of the country, one in the government and the other in the opposition. Who benefits from the trolls’ abuse of leaders? It is natural that the followers and supporters of one leader will have a difference of opinion with the supporters of the other leader. Let those differences be expressed in a civilised, decent and dignified manner. Attacking and abusing one another’s leaders and levelling malicious allegations against them only ends up maligning the both and creates bad blood.
The “battle of trolls” is now a real thing. It is happening and it will continue to happen in the future as well. And nobody has any control over it. In the age of AI and deep fakes, the battle is likely to turn uglier. By the time the truth is established, it will be too late. Moreover, everyone having access to and using social media is not “literate enough” to differentiate between real and fake. In fact, not many people, irrespective of the level of knowledge they possess, will be in a position to mark the difference.
And it is this ignorance of the masses that is manipulated and exploited by the trolls. With people like Swamy always around to come out with impish and imaginary ideas and accusations, the trolls are always likely to have a field day in this battle in which there are no winners and there never will be.
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