A number of Twitter handles that were active in defending the industrialist when his Australia project came under fire have now trained their guns on Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

On July 18, senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta resigned as Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) editor after the directors of the Sameeksha Trust, which runs the storied journal, ordered him to take down an article on the Adani group.

Since then many academicians, journalists and readers have expressed support for Thakurta and questioned the trust's decision to remove the article. Faced with backlash, the trustees claimed that the former editor had committed "a grave impropriety amounting to a breach of trust" in responding to a legal letter from the Adani group on their behalf without informing them or seeking their assent.

On July 28, a letter written to the trustees by the EPW staff demanding an explanation for why the trust decided to retract the article was leaked on the internet. The letter, which was supposed to be confidential, was uploaded and quickly deleted from Scribd but a version published by The Quint is now being circulated on social media. Many of the handles pushing the link are clearly social marketers tasked with maligning Guha Thakurta's image, presumably on behalf of a client.

When not bashing Guha Thakurta, the above mentioned accounts are busy promoting #InfinixNOTE4, #YehHaiIndia, ICICI #Safebanking and #JabHarrySejalMetUC.

Interestingly, many of the accounts tweeting against Guha Thakurta were also used in April this year to tweet pro-Adani tweets when his mining company was seeking a $900 million loan from Australian taxpayers for a controversial project.

The mining and energy project, which will open a new coal province in the Australian state of Queensland to feed Indian demand, saw waves of protests from environmental groups concerned about the health of the country’s Great Barrier Reef.

The accounts used three hashtags -- #Queensland, #Adani and #Carmichael -- suggesting that the mine would be great for Queensland jobs. A similar pattern can be seen with tweets about Paranjoy.

A quick look at their tweeting pattern reveal some interesting characteristics - they regularly participate in contests that require a lot of tweeting, most of these handles follow each other, unlike 'bots' they have thousands of followers and most of them describe themselves as 'social media enthusiasts'.

In the same month, similar accounts were used to disperse concerns regarding Adani group's debt.

A few days earlier, they were busy circulating a video of socialite Suhel Seth advocating for the Adani Group.

Similar handles came to Adani's rescue when he was questioned about his debt after he tweeted about the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

The practice of hiring social media influencers to counter bad publicity has been seen a number of times over the last year in the Indian context.

The use of paid social media trolls to spread positive messages about demonetisation was extensively documented by FactorDaily.

News channels too have adopted similar practices in the past to make hashtags trend.

Note: The Wire had republished the two articles on Adani that his lawyers have objected to. In deference to Adani's demand that the second of these be removed, EPW took it down. You can read both articles here:

• Did the Adani Group Evade Rs 1,000 Crore in Taxes?
• Modi Government’s Rs 500-Crore Bonanza to the Adani Group

This article went live on August first, two thousand seventeen, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the evening.

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