Bangladesh Election Faces Surge in Disinformation Campaign

Bangladesh’s upcoming general election on February 12 faces an unprecedented wave of digital manipulation, with experts warning that voter choice is being threatened by coordinated disinformation campaigns, many originating from neighboring India.

The election marks Bangladesh’s first since the 2024 student-led uprising that ousted long-time leader Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India where she has been hosted by the Hindu-nationalist government. As the nation of 170 million prepares to vote, authorities have grown increasingly concerned about the scale of online manipulation.

Interim leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus highlighted the severity of the situation in January when he reached out to UN rights chief Volker Turk for assistance, describing a “flood of misinformation surrounding the elections” from both foreign and local sources.

Much of the disinformation centers around alleged attacks against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority population, which comprises approximately 10 percent of the country’s residents. Social media platforms have seen mass postings of claims that Hindus are under attack, often using the inflammatory hashtag “Hindu genocide.”

However, according to police figures released in January, out of 645 incidents involving members of minority groups in 2025, only 12 percent were classified as having sectarian motives, contradicting the widespread narrative of targeted violence.

The US-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate has tracked more than 700,000 posts generated by over 170,000 accounts on X (formerly Twitter) making claims of “Hindu genocide” between August 2024 and January 2026.

“We have tracked coordinated Indian disinformation online, falsely alleging large-scale violence against Hindus in Bangladesh,” said Raqib Naik, head of the think tank. “More than 90 percent of this content originated from India, with the remainder linked to associated Hindu nationalist networks in the UK, US, and Canada.”

The sophistication of the disinformation campaign is particularly concerning, with numerous AI-generated videos circulating widely. AFP Fact Check has debunked several examples, including a computer-generated video of an armless woman appealing to voters not to support the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which many consider a frontrunner in the election.

In another fabricated video, a Hindu woman claims people of her faith have been instructed to vote for Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s main Islamist party, or face exile to India. Of the hundreds of AI-generated videos documented by AFP Fact Check teams across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, very few carry AI disclaimers.

The surge in disinformation follows years of political repression under Hasina’s regime, during which opposition was systematically crushed and dissenting voices silenced. This created an information vacuum that is now being exploited.

“We are noticing a huge amount of fake information compared to other times,” said Miraj Ahmed Chowdhury, head of the Dhaka-based research organization Digitally Right, noting that freely available AI tools have made creating sophisticated fakes easier than ever before.

The tension has spilled over into the sports world. Social media outrage by Hindu fundamentalists about the lone Bangladeshi cricket player in India’s domestic IPL league resulted in his club cancelling his contract – a controversy that escalated to Bangladesh’s national team withdrawing from this month’s T20 World Cup in India.

While analysts maintain that much of the disinformation originates from India, there is no evidence that these campaigns are officially organized by the Indian government. India’s foreign ministry has stated they have recorded a “disturbing pattern of recurring attacks on minorities” by “extremists in Bangladesh” while emphasizing their support for “free, fair, inclusive and credible elections.”

Bangladesh’s Election Commission has established a dedicated unit to monitor social media posts and is working with Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to combat misleading information. Commission spokesman Md. Ruhul Amin Mallik explained, “If our team detects any content as harmful and misleading, we instantly announce it as fake information.” However, the sheer volume of disinformation makes this a daunting task.

Election expert Jasmine Tuli, a former election commission official, highlighted the particular vulnerability of Bangladesh’s population to AI-generated disinformation. With smartphone penetration reaching over 80 percent in urban areas and nearly 70 percent in rural regions, many citizens remain relatively inexperienced with digital literacy.

“It is a big threat for a country like Bangladesh, since people don’t have much awareness to check the information,” Tuli warned. “Due to AI-generated fake visuals, voters get misguided in their decision.”