On October 18, the castle of cards made on the foundation of the ‘Meta Vs The Wire’ saga crumbled down as The Wire retracted its reports and ‘initiated an internal inquiry.’ The step came after one of the independent experts who were quoted by the Wire for validating Meta’s communication head Andy Stone’s email(s), came forward and said on Twitter he never did any DKIM validation for The Wire. The reports by The Wire were written by their reporter Devesh Kumar.
For some time, let’s say approximately an hour, Devesh deactivated his Twitter account on Tuesday after The Wire issued a statement that it was reviewing the reports and initiated an inquiry. Devesh, in his tweets, claimed he just deactivated to get some air and eat some chaat outside and reactivated once he was back. While replying to netizens who questioned the “experts”, he refused to comment on why the expert(s) denied their involvement in the verification process.
Notably, Devesh Kumar also worked on Tek Fog stories by The Wire, which the news portal claims to continue working on. To jog up the memory, here is our latest piece on the absurdity called Tek Fog. At that time, Logically.ai’s Ayushman Kaul also helped The Wire with the reports. Interestingly, the duo, Devesh and Kaul, collaborated on the ‘Meta Vs The Wire’ reports as well.
This time Kaul did not come forward openly. However, in one of the tweets, Devesh revealed that Kaul gave voice to the DKIM verification video they published in one of the reports. Though the report has been de-platformed (as per The Wire for internal investigation), the video is still available on The Wire’s Twitter handle. It is unclear how much Kaul individually or as part of Logically was involved in the reports linked to ‘Meta Vs The Wire’ with technical aspects of the investigation. OpIndia cannot independently verify the extent, if any, of Logically.ai or Kaul’s involvement in the Meta-related reports by The Wire.
We verified @andymstone‘s email from our source using a DKIM signature.
— The Wire (@thewire_in) October 15, 2022
Here’s a step by step explainer of how we did it, how the dkimpy tool works, and how it showed us that the email from our source was authentic.
Read the report here: https://t.co/pcFISFD6wG pic.twitter.com/cliDMRnZ20
Here is an archive link to the tweet. The tweet that mentioned Kaul had been deleted. Kaul also deleted his comments under the tweet where Devesh revealed it was his voice.
There are other netizens on Twitter as well who pointed out that Kaul was the voice behind The Wire’s DKIM video.
Guess you also need to talk @KaulAyushman who is the voice that explained Wires DKIM verification video …. I am guessing he shadow contributed to this story …
— Telugu_vaaru 🇮🇳 (@Telugu_vaaru) October 18, 2022
This tweet says the voice is @KaulAyushman‘s – he doesn’t seem like The Wire’s own.
— 1LittleCoder💻 (@1littlecoder) October 15, 2022
https://t.co/Z6Qg93kef6
As a matter of fact, there is no tweet from Ayushman with mention of Devesh linked to The Wire reports. He actively participated in the conversation, but the tweets have now been deleted. This screenshot shows that Kaul had replied to Buzzfeed’s Pranav Dixit at one point related to the report, and Devesh also chipped into that thread, but several of the tweets are now missing.
As can be seen, Logically’s Kaul was quite clued in on the reportage of The Wire on Meta.
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 one on Tek Fog in January this year. During Tek Fog reporting, Ayushman and Devesh did Ask Me Anything sessions on YouTube and Reddit to answer questions about the reports. Those AMA sessions are still available to check.
Kaul has contributed to multiple stories on The Wire such as “What the SOS Tweets Tell us About the Second Wave of COVID-19”, “Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends”, and “Anonymous Complainant Targeting Zubair Tweet Linked to Tek Fog App, BJYM Leader in Gujarat”.
Ayushman Kaul, as per his LinkedIn account, works as a Senior Analyst at Logically. He joined the company in January 2022. It is unclear if he joined Logically after the Tek Fog exposes which were reported in first week of January or after. Earlier, he was associated with Digital Forensic Research Lab as a South Asian Research Analyst.
However, The Wire had claimed that they worked on Tek Fog for over a year and a half before publishing the report in January 2022 based on wild allegations tweeted by an anonymous Twitter account in April 2020. The account by name of ‘Aarthi Sharma’ was created in April 2020 and had just 121 tweets and has been inactive since July 2020. You can read more about this here.
The link between Logically and Congress
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. The company was one of the sponsors of the event. Gandhi’s session was on May 21, which was reported by us. Rahul Gandhi spoke at the event ‘Ideas of India’ in the United Kingdom, organized by Bridge India. Resorting to his usual scaremongering, Rahul Gandhi asserted that a civil war in India would not surprise him because the country was extremely unstable. He stated that India was in a horrible position and that a political revolution was required.
To substantiate his contention, he stated that the Bharatiya Janata Party has “poured kerosene around the country” and that a single spark is enough to blow the country up.
“We have a massive level of polarization, huge unemployment. We have the backbone of employment broken, and we have a massive concentration of wealth. We are going to have social problems, and they’re coming. There’s no doubt about it,” he further said.
He even supported the US interfering in internal matters of the country. Gandhi was then asked about the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking about human rights violations in India in a press conference. To that, Rahul replied, “I’m glad that the United States has woken up to this idea.” Tweaking the course of his answer, he said that the US is not needed in order to make us realize the issue. “It has been quite a long time since to sense it,” he stated.
Tek Fog, the ‘app’, which Logically employee worked on and published by The Wire, was used by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to attack the BJP.
Meet Logically, the company where Ayushman Kaul works
Founded by Lyric Jain, Logically is a British Multinational technology startup company that claims to combine AI and expert analysts to “tackle harmful and manipulative content at speed and scale.” The company was founded in 2017. The headquarters are based out of Brighouse, England, and offices are spread across London, Mysuru, Bengaluru, and Virginia.
The problematic portfolio of Logically
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.
More worryingly, @Lyric_Jain offers a doxxing service. For those who are willing to pay and are perhaps politically aligned, the service is designed to reveal the identities of anonymous handles. Claiming Covid is a bioweapon is apparently enough to invite an “investigation.” pic.twitter.com/cU3Phnx7gY
— Surya Kanegaonkar (@suryakane) May 11, 2022
Logically India has been accused of running a disinformation campaign against Union Ministries. The account follows the usual regime change agents, including Mohammad Zubair of Alt News, Rana Ayyub of Washington Post (Amazon, which owns Washington Post, also funds Logically), News Laundry, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Barkha Dutt, and The Quint, and many others.
Normalizing Bengal post-election violence
In May 2021, they published a report titled ‘Stop The Steal, West Bengal Style: Disinfo Narratives Around Political Violence’ in which they tried to blame the BJP for misinformation after its workers experienced waves of violence post-poll.
While asserting that post-poll violence is common in Bengal, Logically said, “As swathes of fake images and videos of the violence gained traction on social media, hashtags such as #PresidentsRuleInBengal, #BengalBurning and #ArrestMamataBanerjee trended on Twitter. The flood of misinformation and disinformation amplified by pro-BJP handles appears carefully crafted and coordinated to portray the state’s grip on law and order as lacking, hence justifying the invocation of the President’s rule in the state.” They clearly blamed BJP leaders for the misinformation.
Interestingly, in 2020, the Indian Government awarded Logically in AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge under the News section.
If tech experts had not debunked the claims of The Wire, the reports on the alleged link between Meta and BJP would likely have been used by the Congress leaders during the state as well as Lok Sabha elections in the coming years. This is how the global left ecosystem is coming together in coordinated fashion to build narratives.
