Paragraph 1 It was early October in New Delhi, and the air carried the restless energy of a city that had become the stage for a political drama. Thousands of people poured into the streets, their voices rising in unison, their placards bobbing above the crowd like waves on a troubled sea. They were not all seasoned activists or hardened political operatives; many were young, some were students, others were simply citizens who felt that something had gone wrong with the machinery of their democracy. The target of their anger was not a foreign enemy or an economic crisis, but…

Picture a room full of journalists in Dubai, notebooks open and cameras ready, listening to a senior Emirati official speak plainly about a threat that most people cannot see but many have felt: the quiet, relentless hum of fake accounts churning through social media. Abdulla bin Mohammed bin Butti Al Hamed, Chairman of the UAE’s National Media Authority, did not sugarcoat the scale of the problem. He told the audience at the UAE Correspondents’ Majlis that more than 11,000 new social media bots were created in October 2026 alone. Eleven thousand in a single month. He called it “a huge…