Actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death in June has set off a bizarre wave of conspiracy theories that have played out on Indian news channels, ...
Actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death in June has set off a bizarre wave of conspiracy theories that have played out on Indian news channels, social media networks and even in the world of politics. The controversy has churned up a dizzying array of topics: the perceived nepotism of Bollywood families, Bengalis as black magic practitioners, claims of widespread recreational drugs by filmstars and the allegedly obstructive role of the Mumbai police.
On Saturday, this was brought to an end as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences backed up what the Mumbai Police had said till now: Sushant Singh Rajput had died by suicide. All theories of murder were ruled out.
How then did these rumours come to occupy such a major part of Indian public life over the past three months? On Tuesday, the Mumbai Police registered two first information reports under the Information Technology Act alleging that over 80,000 fake social media accounts had been used to “derail” the investigation.
As it turns out, a study of social media content on Sushant Singh Rajput between June 14 and September 12 led by Joyojeet Pal, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, charted out how the conspiracy narrative was pushed....
