The death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput in June has sparked a strange wave of conspiracy theories that have developed on Indian news channels, social media, and even in the world of politics. The controversy has sparked a dizzying array of issues: the perceived nepotism of Bollywood families, Bengalis as practitioners of black magic, claims of widespread use of recreational drugs by movie stars, and the allegedly obstructive role of the police. from Mumbai.
On Saturday, this ended when the Indian Institute of Medical Sciences endorsed what the Mumbai police had said so far: Sushant Singh Rajput had died by suicide. All murder theories were discarded.
So how did these rumors come to occupy such an important part of Indian public life for the past three months? On Tuesday, Mumbai police registered two first information reports under the Information Technology Act alleging that more than 80,000 fake social media accounts had been used to “derail” the investigation.
It turns out that a study of social media content on Sushant Singh Rajput between June 14 and September 12 led by Joyojeet Pal, associate professor at the University of Michigan and principal investigator at Microsoft Research India, mapped how the narrative developed. of the conspiracy. pushed.
The researchers studied “YouTube pages of major television news channels, trending Twitter hashtags and tweets from politicians, influencers, journalists and media in India, and an archive of compiled debunked disinformation stories of factcheckers operating in India. ”
Much of the momentum has a clear political advantage, with the Bharatya Janata Party using it to attack the Maharashtra state government led by Shiv Sena.
However, the news itself generated intense public engagement, with news consumers backing journalists who reported outlandish theories about the Rajput’s death.
How BJP pushed the conspiracy angle
While initial news reports tended to highlight that the Rajput had died due to a suicide, this narrative soon shifted towards conspiracy theories that claimed the actor had been murdered. The BJP has a different role to play in this, the study found.
As the data shows, the BJP showed a strong preference for pushing forward the murder theory compared to Congress, which stuck to suicide. “The data strongly suggests that the BJP pushed the hint of ‘murder’ as more than ‘suicide’ was used in most weeks since July,” the study concludes.
Attacking Shiv Sena
Why would a political party invest efforts around the death of a Bollywood actor? The answer may lie in the fact that Sushant Singh’s conspiracy theories were soon used to attack the Maharashtra government, led by a Shiv Sena-Congress coalition.
The study notes that, along with conspiracy theories, the Mumbai police came under heavy attack. This was mainly led by the social media of politicians belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in opposition in the state.
Due to the alleged ineffectiveness of the Mumbai police, the police from Singh’s home state of Bihar landed in the city and began their own investigation into the death.
In addition to targeting the Mumbai police, the social media activity surrounding the Rajput’s death specifically targeted Shiv Sena and Aditya Thackeray, who is a minister and son of the prime minister. “The use of hashtags by politicians shows a systematic targeting of Shiv Sena (# UddhavResignOrCBI4SSR, #ShameOnMahaGovt, #BabyPenguin), the latter being a derogatory reference directed at Aditya Thackeray,” the report noted. “This shows that the use of hashtag by politicians is dominated by those who are enemies of the current Maharashtra government, largely the BJP.”
General interest
While the BJP played a key role, there was also great general interest surrounding the Rajput’s death and the media, in particular, were eager to push conspiracy theories forward.
The media, especially television channels, played a major role in demonizing Rajput partner Rhea Chakraborty. The study notes (see chart above) that the media began to corner the narrative in early August by calling for Chakraborty’s arrest.
With no evidence of any crime related to the Rajput’s death, Chakraborty was eventually arrested by the Bureau of Narcotics Control for purchasing a small amount of marijuana for the actor. This had nothing to do with the initial conspiracy theories surrounding the Rajput’s death, a sign of how thoroughly the news channels had managed to demonize Chakraborty.
Much of the media narrative was driven by channels that were seen as aligned with BJP. “Republic TV is clearly the outlier in terms of the retweet rates it gets from its typical tweets about Sushant Singh Rajput,” the study said. “The channel receives a massive boost online from its followers on Twitter when it engages with the topic, several times more than most other channels.”
However, the study also notes that there was interest in this topic across the board: “The four main English news channels – Republic, TimesNow, CNNNews18 and IndiaToday have a large volume of tweets about Sushant Singh Rajput, showing that in all channels there is to recognize and take advantage of the value of history “.
Why did the channels turn to this story? The answer, the report argues, lies in the audience: “That the audience has consistently rewarded the news channels for following this story, for example, through meteoric audience ratings for the Republic news network, which has offered the more aggressive coverage, is a testimony of citizenship. complicity.”
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