Thread by @digitaldutta

Next Talk: Weaponising Data For Politics by @ShivamShankarS #FifthEl

Political Parties have invested al-teast $0.5 billion on data campaigns in India #FifthEl

First time Indian heard about data being manipulated for elections was from CambridgeAnalytica #FifthEl

The tech stack for political campaigns is basic python for crawling and d3.js for vis and android apps #FifthEl

There is lot of public data available on government websites which can be used to target voters #FifthEl

There are algorithms to co-relate surname of a person to the caste of the person #FifthEl

Relationships and details of family are mapped by political volunteers #FifthEl

Political Parties have so much free labour. People liked being involved in strategising for elections #FifthEl

Election Commission data and details of caste one can find what community is voting for whom #FifthEl

Intuition of political volunteers on voting patterns based on caste always true #FifthEl

Data brokers sell all kind of information for very affordable prices #FifthEl

Political parties have used electrical bills to identify socio economic patterns #FifthEl

WhatsApp is major tool for political campaigns. 2014 elections had 9k-18k whatsapp groups and Karnataka 2018 elections alone had 20k whatsapp groups. #FifthEl

Caste groups and surveys for specific groups to identify election promises to do political propaganda is how fake news starts. #FifthEl

Political parties are now collecting data on beneficiaries to do targeted campaigns. They are even considering to acquire call data records to identify network patterns #FifthEl

There is not enough provisions to safeguard data. No action was taken against any of the #Aadhaar leaks. #FifthEl

Need self regulation by @TwitterIndia @Facebook @WhatsApp to counter fake news, protect personal data of citizens. #FifthEl

WhatsApp research on Fake News may not be enough #FifthEl

We need to do more to protect citizen's data. India needs a data protection law yesterday, Not tomorrow. #FifthEl