New Delhi, Aug 12 : Farhatullah Ghauri, the terrorist recruiter and financier for the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) is using a variety of accounts on Facebook, Telegram and YouTube to appeal to Muslims in India to protest against the nation A thorough inquiry of artificial Intelligence (AI) startup Logically has discovered.Ghauri is listed as one of 38 people as terrorists by the Ministry of Home Affairs under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 (amended in 2019).
The three encrypted Telegram channels, two related Facebook pages as well as three YouTube channels, run by the Ghauri Group, were all launched this year.
The network was discovered by Logically before it could build an impressive audience, peaking with 200-400 customers across all accounts.
In the course of the investigation, teams responsible for moderation of content took off one Telegram channel as well as a Facebook page associated with the group.
“The terror propaganda has been circulated through various encrypted messaging platforms on Telegram and other messaging platforms, including those that are associated with Islamabad-backed proxy terrorist organizations which claim to be operating in the Kashmir region, like the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) and The Resistance Front (TRF),” Logically said in an announcement.
The company claimed that a more thorough examination of the patterns of amplifying of the videos posted on Facebook since January 2022 indicates an organized effort of malicious actors to share the videos in Facebook groups and on pages that are dedicated to socialism, Islam as well as minority rights.
“These groups are visited by largerand more popular audiences of people in the country who are opposed to the policies of the ruling BJP government” said the report.
Furthermore the coordinated online campaigns also coincide with incidents off-line of violence between communities in the nation, showing how dangerous foreign actors are using the major social media platforms to capitalize on domestic tensions and radicalize the minorities.
“The terrorist propaganda amplified via these channels consists of professionally-edited videos with voice overs by Ghauri.
A few of the videos deal with the discourse of Muslim minorities that are believed to be suffering human rights violations from Indian security forces in Jammu, Kashmir and other regions of India,” stated the report.
“There are explicit appeals by Ghauri for Indian Muslims to rebel and join hands in opposition to the Indian state,” the report mentioned.
A look at the distribution of the videos posted on Facebook between the 1st of January and 1st July 2022, using the software for analyzing social media, CrowdTangle revealed that Ghauri’s posts were amplified across a variety of mainstream Facebook groups and pages dedicated to Islam socialism, socialism, and minorities rights.
“While platform officials removed those posts, the timestamps of the videos in these groups as well as the usage of similar descriptions and captions that accompany the video suggests the existence of an effort to copy paste by a single person,” stated Logically.
As with other accounts run by the company that runs the account, the extremist videos that were broadcast through Telegram.Telegram channels were also supported by specific hashtags that exposed the content to Indian Muslims who use the platform.
The other name is Abu Sufiyan, Ghauri is originally from the Kurmaguda region of Hyderabad and is most well-known as an infamous terrorist financier.
He left for Saudi Arabia in 1994 and eventually was able to settle in Pakistan in the year 2015.
“In out of being an intimate partner of Masood Azhar and the United Nations designated terrorist and the JeM’s founder of JeM Ghauri is personally involved by Indian intelligence agencies for planning and facilitating a string of terrorist attacks in the country,” the report mentioned.
The report stated that Pakistan-backed proxy terrorist organisations are looking to capitalize on the conflict between communities and the offline manifestations of tension and integrate these into propaganda videos and distribute them across the major social media platforms.
na/vd
