WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — Social media accounts posting from India pushed videos backing Haley Stevens, Abdul El-Sayed’s rival in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, researchers have found, as anti-Muslim posts aimed at El-Sayed rose twentyfold in the week after he won that race.
Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous group of disinformation researchers, identified at least 28 accounts on X that shadow-posted videos supporting Stevens before the August 4 primary, drawing more than seven million views. At least 15 of them were posting from India, a review of the accounts found. Researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensic Hub also found for-hire Indian accounts and pages using similar tactics to support Stevens against El-Sayed. Who paid for the posts has not been established.
The accounts fit a wider trade. Indian political consultants have described selling “shadow” campaigns abroad, running pages that hide who is behind them, from Kenya’s 2022 presidential election to races in Africa and South America. One content creator said he was paid about $7 a day to make posts for such pages. Claims circulating online that Hindu nationalist networks ran the accounts in Michigan are not supported by the research published so far, which describes commercial operators selling attention to paying clients.
The abuse: El-Sayed, who on Tuesday became the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, faced a far larger wave of anti-Muslim abuse online. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington-based research group, analysed 38,280 Islamophobic posts naming him between January 1 and August 10 on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Bluesky.
Posts targeting him averaged 155 a day from June 1 to August 3, then jumped to 3,099 a day between August 4 and 10, a rise of 1,895 per cent. That single week produced 21,690 posts, more than half of the year’s total, peaking at 6,923 on August 5, the day Stevens conceded.
The most common themes were false claims linking him to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, claims that he would impose Sharia law, and calls for “remigration”, the mass removal of Muslims. The group said the same pattern appeared during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York last year, and that it activates whenever a Muslim candidate becomes competitive.
Politicians fed the climate too. President Donald Trump repeatedly called El-Sayed a “jihadist” on the campaign trail. Earlier this year the same research group documented 89 elected officials who had published 1,111 anti-Muslim social media posts over 13 months, introduced eight bills and formed a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” that grew to 65 members. Stevens herself endorsed El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, two days before the vote. El-Sayed beat Rogers.
