As leftist propaganda outlet The Wire withdraws its stories accusing Meta of being hand in gloves with the BJP and granting absurd superpowers to its IT Cell head Amit Malviya, here is a look at how its other such fantastical story is quite obviously a dud and very well planned and executed propaganda. Devesh Kumar of The Wire, one of the reporters on this Meta saga along with The Wire’s Founding Editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, worked on the Tek Fog report too.
In fact, even in that report, The Wire had cited one unnamed ‘lead architect with Microsoft’ as one of the ‘experts’ who worked with them to verify their ‘findings’ on the app.
To put things in perspective, The Wire had claimed a lead architect currently working at Microsoft Asia had verified the email sent by Meta to The Wire. They had even said they had consent of the said Microsoft employee, Ujjwal Kumar, based out of Singapore, to disclose his identity. Subsequently, The Wire had shared it.
Hours after The Wire published the story and Varadarajan publicly shared the above screenshot of the mail, The Wire claimed that Kumar has now backed down from putting his name public. It turns out, Microsoft had denied Kumar being involved in the circus and had said how the mail was not sent by him. In fact, amid all this, The Wire never admitted that Microsoft had reached out to them to deny Ujjwal Kumar’s involvement in this Meta saga. It came to the fore only after another propaganda outlet, Newslaundry, put it out publicly that Microsoft had issued them a statement denying Kumar’s involvement in this.
Omission to tell the truth is also deception and let it be known that Siddharth Varadarajan, The Wire and everyone associated with it hid this crucial piece of information from the readers. This information that Microsoft had denied Kumar’s involvement was withheld by The Wire till now. Moreover, at this point, it is not clear whether the ‘lead architect at Microsoft’ being talked about in Tek Fog report is the same as the one mentioned in the Meta story.
Devesh Kumar of The Wire has worked on both these stories and in an interview with Platformer, Varadarajan has said that only Devesh Kumar interacted with the ‘sources’. It is not yet clear whether anyone The Wire other than Kumar interacted with Microsoft in both of these stories.
Further, remember the video shared by Varadarajan for their DKIM verification? The video is now removed from Varadarajan’s timeline, but here’s a screenshot where Devesh Kumar can be seen boasting how the voice in the video is of one Ayushman Kaul.
Who is Ayushman Kaul?
Ayushman Kaul is a senior analyst at Logically.ai, a dubious website that has been involved in the anti-India narrative. Based out of London, Kaul has collaborated with The Wire on many tech-related projects, including the Tek Fog one in January this year. In May 2022, OpIndia explained how Logically was involved in sponsoring an anti-India stunt event where Rahul Gandhi was one of the guest speakers. Logically also provides ‘doxxing’ services to ‘uncover’ the identity of anonymous accounts and proudly gloats about it in the description of one of its case studies. In one of the claims made by The Wire’s reporter, Devesh, Kaul gave the voice to the video describing the DKIM verification process. However, the tweet was later deleted. It is unclear to what extent Kaul was involved in Meta story by The Wire.
Dubious social media accounts as primary trigger for elaborate fiction
The Meta saga started with the story published by The Wire early this month where they had reported how an obscure account’s Instagram posts were being taken down by the photo sharing platform. Their first report mentioned how one account called ‘cringearchivist’ had 7 of his posts removed by Instagram over community guidelines violation. If you have spent fairly enough time on social media in past few years, you would know this appears unfair but is fairly regular and he non-left is more often than not on the receiving end of such censorship.
However, after this initial report, The Wire’s Jahnavi Sen informed Cringe Archivist that it was actually Amit Malviya who brought down his posts. Apparently they found his name on list of super elite users (XCheck) and had given him extraordinary powers where he could get anything he wants removed at will. The Wire wanted us to believe that despite all these superpowers, Malviya went after a nonentity like Cringe Archivist with fewer than 500 followers on Instagram at that time. The Wire sympathisers even believed these fantastical claims even as BJP supporter themselves found this absurd and hilarious.
Notably, it is amusing that if Malviya did have such superpowers as claimed by The Wire, he would go after random obscure account with hardly any clout and not other more popular accounts that regularly throw much at the BJP.
But before The Wire conjured up Meta story over this trigger, they had come up with the fiction called ‘Tek Fog’, the super app with impossible capabilities. The Tek Fog nonsense was also authored by Devesh Kumar.
The trigger for Tek Fog were a few tweets by an absolute obscure Twitter account by the name ‘Aarthi Sharma’. The Twitter account was created in April 2020.
This account has only 121 tweets till now and has not tweeted since 31 July 2020. The tweets are all anti-BJP, calling PM Modi a ‘phenku’ and other things straight out of a Congress supporter’s rulebook. Which is fine if one were honest and brave enough to admit they are Congress supporters. However, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ (with an extra h in the name), has ‘ExBhakt’ in her bio to give credibility to her posts.
The account started tweeting on 24th April, 2020 and after initial 3-4 tweets to BJP leaders, accusing them of maligning India globally, the account responded to official BJP account and claimed they worked for the BJP IT cell. They claimed BJP paid Rs 2 per tweet to tweet in their support and how they were promised ‘government job’ should BJP return to power in 2019.
This ‘Rs 2/tweet’ jibe is often used by Congress supporters to attack BJP supporters online. In fact, even opposition politicians and ‘neutral journalists’ often use the jibe to mock those who do not toe their line. That the ‘BJP Insider’ would use the same jibe is laughable to say the least.
Minutes later, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ tweeted once again, claiming they got Rs 2/tweet and how they had to ‘cover’ at least 40 ‘pro-opposition handles’. They also claimed they were promised ‘government job’. The Twitter account then used the reply function to spam multiple Twitter accounts, official government, media and even Sachin Tendulkar’s with the same response.
They even tweeted same content to Congress’ social media worker, Gaurav Pandhi.
There were at least 3 tweets sent to Pandhi in span of minutes with the same text above.
To appear more credible, the account threw some shade on ‘Poop India’ and WhatsApp University.
Nothing makes one more credible than the ‘Poop India’ and ‘WhatsApp university’ jibe. But the final blow was yet to come. Later that night, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ invoked Amit Malviya, the ‘all powerful individual’ in the BJP. (At this point, I cannot get over how The Wire not only believed this entire drama with all conviction, but also their supporters believed so.)
‘Aarthi Sharma’ is now officially a whistleblower account. Amit Malviya has been invoked. For next two days, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ wishes the likes of Rana Ayyub for Ramzan, while calls Rubika Liaqat ‘phenku puppet’ and asks Salman Khan to save secular fabric of the nation from ‘terrorists of BJP’. Do note that all these are the catchphrases very, very often used by Congress supporters on an unhinged rant under garb of anonymity.
‘Aarthi Sharma’ then, on 25 April, retweets an April 16 tweet by Congress’ Gaurav Pandhi.
On 25 April late night, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ tweeted they were getting ‘death threats’ from ‘fellow Bhakths’. Here also there’s an extra ‘h’ in Bhakts like their name ‘Aarthi’. Usually one notices people in South of India have an extra ‘h’ in the English spelling of their name owing to pronunciation differences.
So by now we know a ‘former BJP Insider’ turned ‘whistleblower’ who has accused Amit Malviya of being a ‘ringleader’ of ‘misinformation’ is getting ‘death threats’. The net has been laid.
When the account started getting noticed, one of the tweets it posted on April 24 started getting more traction. Here is the tweet:
This tweet was also one of the two tweets which formed basis of The Wire ‘exposé’ on BJP IT Cell. They then tweet that they were added to multiple ‘WhatsApp groups’ and were ‘ordered to target unbiased journalists like Nidhi Razdan, Rana Ayyub, Bdutt’. The account even tweeted their ‘code’.
Even the ‘journalists’ mentioned above do not consider themselves ‘unbiased’. Moving on, the Twitter account then continues to tweet same tirade against the BJP till April 28, 2020 when it first mentions ‘Tek Fog’.
Multiple people had reached out to ‘Aarthi Sharma’ back in April 2020 asking for further details on this ‘Tek Fog’, but the account never shared anything with them publicly.
On April 28, 2020, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap retweeted her tweets. It was likely one of the first prominent accounts to retweet ‘Aarthi Sharma’.
Days later it hailed how BJP had ‘hijacked’ social media traffic during Delhi elections in February 2020.
Except, all political parties indulge in social media hashtag trending it is not rocket science to do so. But here, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ wants to portray how BJP controls everything on Internet, a pattern most of the stories published by the Left ecosystem tries to adhere to. They try to portray that the BJP controls everything including AC temperature in your room. Aam Aadmi Party won the Delhi elections.
Here, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ tweets BJP IT cell asked her to troll Shehla Rashid by using doctored porn images of hers. They claim they were sent these via WhatsApp groups to ‘counter her’ on Twitter and Facebook. Except, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ got the timeline mixed up. Shehla did deactivate her Facebook account, but it was in February 2018 and not November 2018. She did so after Islamists had attacked and condemned her for saying Muslim women have the right to marry a non-Muslim man.
You can read in detail about this case here.
After her tweet mocking Modi on April 29, 2020, the account either deactivated themselves of stopped tweeting for two months. Their next tweet was on 30th July 2020.
Now, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ claimed they had moved to ‘Australia’ for a job.
‘Aarthi Sharma’ then claimed that they had moved to Australia. They had claimed they were employed with BJP IT Cell at least til February 2020. This is the first time they were claiming they had been employed in Australia. Australia had international travel ban and it opened its border for foreign travellers in November 2021.
‘Aarthi Sharma’ last tweeted on 31 July 2020.
The last 3 tweets of ‘Aarthi Sharma’ claimed how most people commenting on popular Facebook pages are ‘BJP IT Cell’ workers.
After this, the account has been inactive. One prominent person who follows this account is The Wire Founding Editor, Siddharth Varadarajan.
In January 2022, The Wire published first of its two-part series on ‘Tek Fog’, the mysterious app first talked about by ‘Aarthi Sharma’. The Wire even credited ‘Aarthi Sharma’ as being a whistleblower and claimed they interacted with this individual for over a year and a half to gather all evidences against the BJP IT Cell and Malviya.
The entire article was based on the ‘proofs’ provided by ‘Aarthi Sharma’ but ‘Aarthi Sharma’ did not give any access to ‘Tek Fog’ to The Wire writers, Devesh Kumar and Ayushman Kaul. Even back then, the BJP denied having employed either any ‘Aarthi Sharma’ or existence of ‘Tek Fog’.
The Wire report claimed that the Tek Fog app is linked to Sharechat, but Sharechat has denied any link with the purported app. In a response from the company added to the report later, Sharechat said that they are not aware of the Tek Fog app. Sharechat had repeatedly denied being part of any such nexus as claimed in The Wire report. Today, after things unraveled for The Wire, Sharechat again issued a statement reminding Indians about the previous fraud pulled off by The Wire.
Our Statement on @thewire_inhttps://t.co/M75ZC14fRd pic.twitter.com/JbQcx74xo6
— ShareChat (@sharechatapp) October 19, 2022
Ah, well.
Moving on, based on the claims of Aarthi Sharma, Wire started ‘investigation’ and claimed that they obtained some information from some a source they didn’t reveal. But if one reads the report, it can be found that Wire published the claims despite the fact that they could not verify the claims, and they just blindly reported what their ‘source’ gave them. As mentioned above, an unnamed ‘lead architect at Microsoft’ was thrown in to make the report appear ‘authentic’.
The Wire said they couldn’t access the Tek Fog app, but was able to find some scripts which allowed them to connect to a secure server hosting the Tek Fog app. The source supposedly provided screenshots of the app to Wire, to prove its existence. The report didn’t any include any example of the script, or the URL/IP addresses of the ‘secure server’ that hosted the app.
You can read in detail our analysis on the absurdities of The Wire here.
While The Wire has withdrawn the stories on Meta, Tek Fog absurdity still remains. The questions, however, remain unanswered. Tech experts, many of whom are very vocally anti-Modi, had called out Tek Fog discrepancies even back then. Even then, Varadarajan and The Wire had doubled down like that in Meta story. However, this time, The Wire ran out of luck and their ‘experts’ denied giving their approval, ever.
But don’t get fooled by this. Tomorrow, when it comes to political reportage, especially when it concerns ideology, the echo chamber of The Wire ecosystem will still put their faith in them despite its history of faulty, incorrect and misleading reportage. None of them have called out The Wire’s reportage because it was ideology and political inclination based – which in The Wire’s case is being anti-Modi and pro-Islamist and their apologists. And in matters of ideology one can give a long rope to someone because there are a lot more grey areas. However, in technology when things can be verified WAY too easily, The Wire gets called out by people from the same ‘liberal’ cabal.
Tomorrow, too, when there’s another ideological issue they conjure up and most of those who are calling it out today will likely side with them, forgetting The Wire’s history of shoddy reporting. That is ‘liberal’ privilege.
