Tractors to Twitter: Farmers battle on highway, online

As the farmers were trooping toward Delhi late in 2020, a wave of misinformation began spreading online. Old, unrelated images and videos - including some from demonstrations outside India calling for an independent Sikh homeland - were passed off as representing the farmers.In December, Twitter even flagged a tweet by the head of the BJP's vast social media team, Amit Malviya, as "manipulated media," saying a video he posted showing an elderly protestor narrowly avoiding a police beating had been misleadingly edited.

Amid such rising fake news, a handful of supporters scattered around the world started running a Twitter handle in support of farmers who are protesting at Delhi borders demanding the repeal of three agriculture laws. Few of them formed a twitter account: @Tractor2twitr. to fight such disinformation.

Bhavjit Singh became energised for the battle in November from his bedroom in Ludhiana in the agricultural heartland state of Punjab, where he watched with dismay the online attacks on the farmers. Singh, 38, joined the protesters with two smartphones.With a few friends, the information technology professional launched the @Tractor2twitr Twitter account in late November. The following month he journeyed to the focal protest site on a main highway connecting Haryana state and Delhi, the territory that includes the capital.

Bhavjit Singh's Twitter account, with more than 23,000 followers, promotes its message by pushing one hashtag a day. One day recently, #FarmersDyingModiEnjoying, pushed by @Tractor2twitr, was among the top hashtags on Indian Twitter - battling #ModiWithFarmers.@Tractor2twitr has been joined in recent weeks by a union group called the Farmers Unity Front (Kisan Ekta Morcha), setting up accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Snapchat, staffed by 50 volunteers, that have surged to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Thirteen thousand kilometres (8,000 miles) away in Houston, Texas, Baljinder Singh is part of the core group that helps run the account. The BJP "were targeting us, so we felt we had to answer them back," the owner of a couple of 7-Eleven stores in the United States told Reuters. "We are all the sons and daughters of farmers."