Democracy Day Special Biriyani: A Facebook Feed on Election Day in Bangladesh

The Great National Scroll

The alarm never sounds. Instead, you are pulled from sleep by the visceral, buzzing shudder of your phone against the wooden nightstand -- a trapped hornet of hyperconnectivity. It’s not a single call, but a cascade of notifications, a digital reveille for democracy. You tap the screen. The algorithm, the unseen and all-powerful pandal decorator of the national psyche, has been working overtime.

The Great National Scroll begins, holding a funhouse mirror -- an X-ray, even -- to the clown show unfolding beyond your door.

The Curated Dawn

The first video is a masterclass in sterile calm. Released by a state-aligned digital outlet in the pre-dawn dark, it declares this the “most peaceful, participatory, and technologically advanced election in the nation’s history.”

The production is faultless; a soothing, authoritative voice narrates over shots of pristine ballot boxes and smiling, fictionalized voters.

It feels less like journalism and more like a corporate infomercial for democracy itself. Directly beneath it, the Election Commission’s official page has posted a vibrant graphic: “Your Vote is Your Power.”

The comments are a first skirmish: A thicket of bouncing Bangladeshi flag emojis is besieged by a lone critic pasting links to old news reports. He is ratioed into obscurity within minutes, a digital ghost.

This curated dawn is the opening act. It’s the clown show putting on its full, polished makeup, hoping you won’t peek backstage. The dissonance is the joke. You feel a shallow pang of duty, quickly numbed by the instinct to scroll deeper, where the real performance begins.

The Deepfake Bazaar

The algorithm, sensing your hesitation, serves you the main event. A reel autoplays. It’s a prominent leader, his gaze locked on the camera. The audio is clear -- he is urging supporters to abandon a core policy stance.

But something is off. The lips move with a ghostly, fractional lag. The skin on his face has an unnatural, waxy sheen. This is a precision strike, a product of the new, AI-powered political entrepreneurship.

You swipe. Another reel. A different leader from a different party is now “announcing” his sudden withdrawal from the race, his AI-simulated voice pleading for calm. The comments are a forest of angry and crying emojis, a carnival of manufactured outrage.

“Seeing is believing” is a dead credo. The new national pastime is “squinting is suspecting” -- scrutinizing the odd shadow, the too-perfect cadence, the hollow look in the digitally-altered eyes. You report the video. A cheerful pop-up thanks you for “making Facebook safer.”

The gesture feels cosmically absurd, like trying to bail out the Buriganga with a teacup. The Meme Militias and the Patriotism Marketplace Before the helplessness can settle, the feed pivots to spectacle.

A viral reel stitches together clips of military parades, soaring eagles, and elderly women weeping with joy, all set to a dramatic, synth-heavy cover of a classic patriotic song. It has half a million shares. This is the emotion engine, the clown show’s thrilling parade float.

But in its shadow, the satirists operate. A meme page you follow (one that survives in the narrow space between wit and deletion) posts a photoshopped image of a famous political slogan plastered onto a packet of chanachur.

The caption: “The Only Promise That’s Always Fulfilled.” You bark a laugh. It’s perfect. You go to share it, but the image is already gone, replaced by the cold grey text: “This content has been removed for violating Facebook’s Community Standards.”

The silence where the joke stood is louder than the meme ever was. The battle for the national narrative is fought with GIFs and ironic hashtags, and the clowns with the biggest, most colorful hammers get to censor the rest.

The Livestream Inferno

A notification slices through: [Your Cousin in Savar] is LIVE: What is happening at the school?? You tap in. The video is shaky, vertical, and utterly compelling. It shows a snaking queue under a brutal sun. The audio is a cacophony of complaints and rumors. “They say the EVM is broken,” a voice hisses near the microphone.

The live chat scrolls faster than the line moves: “FRAUD!” “Brothers, be patient!” “This is our right!” “Where is water?” This is the grassroots carnival, the raw, unbranded truth of the day. It is also completely useless for determining any objective fact. It is pure, agonizing sensation. You are not an informed citizen here; you are a voyeur, consuming a tiny fragment of live-streamed anxiety. You leave a heart-eye emoji -- a digital pat on the shoulder that feels profoundly pathetic.

This is the clown show’s basement, where the performers are sweaty, unpaid, and screaming real tears into their phone lenses.

The Algorithmic Intermission

The screen, still hot from the theater of coercion, offers a reprieve. A sponsored reel glides into view with impeccable timing: Democracy Day Special Biriyani! Celebrate Your Freedom of Choice with Every Flavourful Bite! Limited Time Offer!

The video is a slow-motion cascade of golden saffron rice, glistening pieces of meat, and steaming whole boiled eggs. The caption urges you to Vote for your favourite recipe in the comments!

For a full 30 seconds, the nations tense, collective act of self-definition is replaced by the seductive, apolitical logic of consumer choice. You almost click Order Now. Instead, you scroll past, the festive music fading into the digital background, leaving behind a deeper, more resonant silence. The circus has its own catering, and it is relentlessly, deliciously distracting.

The Shadow Carnival

Even a national existential crisis is just another engagement vertical. A sponsored post from a financial influencer analyses “election-volatility stocks,” his charts looking like seismograph readings during an earthquake.

You finally see a post that feels true. It’s from your aunt. It is not a picture of her inked finger. It is a photograph of a perfectly symmetrical pulao, garnished with hard-boiled eggs and fried raisins.

“For the long wait,” the caption reads. In this sea of manipulated rage and performed patriotism, this mundane, edible act of care is the most radical and honest thing you’ve seen all day. You like it, and for a second, the scrolling stops.

The Silence After the Storm

The polls close. One by one, the live streams flicker and die. The official pages go dormant, saving their energy for victory declarations or accusations of theft. The meme pages are quiet. The deepfake bazaar has shut its stalls. Your thumb, trained for twelve hours on a refresh-loop, finally has nothing to pull.

The silence is total. It is a deafening vacuum in your palm. The carnival of noise has packed up its tents and moved to the fortified backrooms where the actual counting -- and negotiating -- begins. The algorithm is resting, ready to reconfigure itself around a new winner, a new official reality, by morning.

You place the phone face down on the table. The clown show is over, for now. The X-ray revealed the brittle bones beneath the greasepaint: A society where truth is a product to be manufactured, outrage is a commodity to be traded, and the simple act of choosing a leader is drowned in a infinite, scrollable sea of noise. The greatest engineering feat wasn’t the deepfake or the viral reel. It was the quiet, efficient partitioning of a nation’s collective anxiety into a personalized, endlessly engaging feed.

You didn’t participate in an election today. You consumed it. And the screen, now dark, offers no reflection to answer whether there’s a difference left at all.

Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is [email protected].