Mumbai: More than 80,000 fake accounts were created on various social media platforms from different countries, such as Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Romania and France on June 14 to discredit Mumbai police and Maharashtra government after the death and during the death probe of actor Sushant Singh Rajput with the intent to ‘discredit’ the city police and the Maharashtra government.

Automated bots are regularly used to inflate traffic surrounding hashtags, a practice aimed at gaming Twitter’s trending topics. ‘Foreign’ accounts are regularly used in this practice, even though the social media giant insists it has preventive measures in place to prevent coordinated campaigns.

The city police’s cyber unit has compiled a report which says posts with hashtags related to the actor’s death were uploaded from foreign countries and in foreign languages.

“We identified the posts in foreign languages because of the hashtags used like #justiceforsushant #sushantsinghrajput and #SSR. We’re in the process of verifying more accounts,” said a senior IPS officer.

“The campaign was run against Mumbai police just to demoralize us. This was a motivated campaign with vested interest just to malign the image of Mumbai police and disrupt our line of investigation. Multiple fake accounts on social media were created to target Mumbai police with abusive tones. Our cyber cell is currently conducting a full investigation into this matter and all those found violating the law shall be prosecuted under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act,” said Param Bir Singh, Mumbai police commissioner.

Reacting to reports of AIIMS having ruled out the possibility of murder, Param Bir Singh said, “We had investigated this case very professionally. The CBI had created a panel of AIIMS doctors who have justified our investigation and the conclusions of Cooper hospital and forensic laboratory. Apart from a few people, nobody else was aware of our investigation still many have criticized the investigation.”

Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh has asked the cyber cell to investigate the alleged fake accounts and register cases under the Information Technology Act.

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