A Critical Political Economy of Campaign Deepfakes in Indian Elections

Few social media studies focus on the ramifications of deepfake usage as a tool of political propaganda in election campaigns. This chapter will contribute to the existing literature by analyzing political deepfakes that are spread on social media platforms, such as WhatsApp, during election campaigns. Among examples of deepfake videos used in India’s election campaigns, I bring to the forefront a unique example of deepfake usage where the fake video was an official video of political propaganda during an election campaign for the first time. The literature that mentions this particular usage of deepfake is scant and refers to it in the context of synthetic advertisements (Campbell et al. 2021), improvement of deepfake detection techniques (Tahir et al. 2021), and the mechanism of the spread of deepfakes (Dasilva et al. 2021). Scholars have yet to analyze why this deepfake video is of concern, especially in an election campaign. This chapter will study the effects of this deepfake video by explaining the relationship between the political party that commissioned it, the technology company it employed to produce it, and the threat to the public sphere. Such AI usage is undemocratic because it undermines the legitimacy of one of the foundational functions of democracy: giving space to free and fair debate. Deepfakes question the ability to hold arguments because they aim to mislead voters through psychological coercion. The fact that BJP used deepfake as an official tool for propaganda and circulated it within private WhatsApp groups speaks to the critical political economy of AI. Mapping the demand and supply chain of stakeholders in the campaign deepfakes ecosystem, the chapter traces how they co-produce personalized and multi-lingual content for electoral mobilization. The emergence of this ecosystem in India reveals how AI-driven political communication thrives in the absence of regulatory safeguards. The chapter responds to the question of how a state-technology sector collaboration perpetuates the commercialization and authentication of undemocratic AI when seen in the context of elections. Such a state-private tech sector collusion deepens the inequities of communication by controlling the narratives. It ultimately engenders vernacular colonialism perpetuated by the state aimed at its own public.