Days after The Wire retracted its reports on the Meta story and ordered an “internal inquiry” into the fiasco, the leftist propaganda website also quietly pulled down its months-old reportage on Tek Fog, an app it claimed was used by the BJP to manipulate trends and automatically spew hate online.
Relying on an August 2020 tweet and some ‘source’, The Wire had claimed that the BJP was using one software named Tek Fog, led by BJP leader Devang Dave, that had unprecedented powers of manipulating online trends and churning out hate to attack its detractors. Even though Dave vigorously rejected the allegations in an email to Wire, they still proceeded to publish the story.
In the report published in January 2022, Wire claimed that the so-called Tek Fog app allowed BJP to ‘hijack’ the Twitter trends, allowed managing multiple WhatsApp accounts and direct online harassment of anti-BJP journalists. The report claimed that the app could bypass all kinds of security features that major social media platforms have. According to The Wire, Tek Fog had some kind of superpower that granted it capabilities that even the NSA of the USA did not have. The Wire alleged that hacking top apps like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc child’s play using Tek Fog, and all security features of those platforms vanish with this magical piece of software.
However, within days, OpIndia punctured holes in The Wire’s report on Tek Fog, highlighting how the leftist propaganda website’s claims on a superpower app did not add up and how the app may be a figment of their fecund imagination. The entire rebuttal can be read here. But it took a span of 10 months and the Meta fiasco that led The Wire, too, withdraw its Tek Fog stories too pending an “internal inquiry”. Incidentally, Devesh Kumar, The Wire staffer who co-authored Meta stories, had also co-authored the Tek Fog stories.
On October 23, 2022, The Wire retracted its stories on Tek Fog, with links to the Tek Fog stories on its website flashing a message. Here’s the screenshot of the message on one of the reports pulled down by The Wire.
While the withdrawal of the Meta and Tek Fog stories is a face-saving attempt by The Wire to pretend that they are transparent and concerned about journalistic ethos, the original lie peddled by them travelled far and wide, finding its way on global platforms and prejudiced organisations that used it to the hilt to tarnish India’s reputation.
How dubious international organisations and leftist media outlets helped spread the lie of Tek Fog
Freedom House, a dubious Human Rights ‘watchdog’ that supported violent protests against a law that gave citizenship rights to persecuted minorities like Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians from Islamic states neighbouring India, dropped the country from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ in 2021. In 2022, too, the organisation maintained India as ‘partly free’, leaning on prejudiced reports and unfounded allegations, including The Wire’s story on Tek Fog, to claim that members of the BJP used it to shape public narratives and manipulate social media opinions.
Likewise, other organisations that have been pathologically averse to India, especially after Modi became the prime minister, cited the Tek Fog story as one of the examples to lower India’s ranking on their farcical indexes. For example, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’s Press Freedom Index 2022 downgraded India from 142 rank last year to 150th this year, placing it even below despotic and dictatorial regimes like that of UAE and Hong Kong, where advances against members of the press are a given.
A report published in HW English cited the Tek Fog story by The Wire to highlight how it has played a part in downgrading India’s ranking from 142 last year to 150 in 2022. In fact, The Wire itself preened on its ‘investigation’ on Tek Fog, which is now suspected to be a case of pure fraud, when they reported on India’s downgrade on the Press Freedom Index earlier this year.
India’s supposed plunge on the ‘democracy index’ and the ‘Press Freedom Index’ has been repeated ad-nauseam both by Indian politicians and other commentators on global platforms, who want to prove India is living under some dystopian dictatorship, and only white masters from the west can come and rescue the poor brown people being oppressed by an evil regime headed by PM Modi.
The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Wikipedia peddled The Wire’s claims on Tek Fog that are now suspected of being pure fraud
Not just these two indices, the Tek Fog fiction was cited by several other global platforms to paint a negative picture of India, such as the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and others, who amplified The Wire’s scarcely credible claims that the BJP used an app to manipulate social media trends and firehose its detractors with hate online. The list is indicative but it gives a window into how the lie was spread far and wide by the nexus of leftist global organisations.
Tim Culpan and Andy Mukherjee, two columnists with Bloomberg, had co-authored an opinion article based on the Wire story on Tek Fog, which was published by several media houses. They had made claims not even made by Wire about the so-called app. They claimed that it was a browser-based application, and it was very powerful.
Making more outlandish claims about the app that does not exist, they had written, “Tek Fog is a military-grade PSYOP – psychological operations – weapon.” A capability like this has so far been available only to state actors for use against enemy populations, they had further said quoting a security researcher.
The Wire’s Tek Fog fabrications have also been used as a citation and proof on multiple articles on Wikipedia that paint India in a bad light. Such articles argue how freedom and democracy standards in India are falling and how the Modi government is solely responsible for it. For example, a Wikipedia article titled “Freedom of the press in India” cites The Wire to make this point.
It is worth noting that Wikipedia is still misunderstood as a neutral platform by millions of unsuspecting netizens around the world, while in reality it has been taken over by ideologues belonging to the leftist camp, who amplify lies and propaganda by the leftist outfits and publications. Wikipedia has domination of left-leaning editors and thus, several pages on Wikipedia are biased, with the information added catering to the whims and fancies of the left-leaning editors.
The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, who is no longer involved with Wikipedia had gone on the record to talk about the bias of the online encyclopedia. Sanger had written that it has long forgotten its original policy of aiming to present information from a neutral point of view, and nowadays the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia “can be counted on” to cover politics with a “liberal point of view”.
The Wire’s Tek Fog story is a perfect example of what the Nazi minister of propaganda Goebbels had famously reported having proposed: “If a lie is repeated a thousand times, it becomes the truth.” The Wire might have withdrawn its article, for now, but the intended lie and propaganda have become part of history and continues to be cited on various global platforms, some of which are listed above.
How The Editor’s Guild of India promoted The Wire’s lies
Apart from the damages that The Wire’s propaganda article has caused to India’s reputation, let us also remind the Editor’s Guild of India that they had issued a ‘brave’ letter condemning the imagined attack on journalists as conjured up by the wire back in January 2022.
The Editors Guild of India condemns the continuing online harassment of women journalists, which includes targeted and organised online trolling as well as threats of sexual abuse. pic.twitter.com/xt7abHyofi
— Editors Guild of India (@IndEditorsGuild) January 11, 2022
Will they now retract the condemnation and instead write another letter condemning the wire? It is anybody’s guess what The Editor’s Guild of India will do after The Wire is exposed for its fake and prejudiced reportage.
However, the Tek Fog episode serves as a cautionary tale for Indians, given that the is just one propaganda article by one leftist outlet causing such extensive damage to India’s reputation globally. Readers can guess just how much damage has been done over the years by the entire mesh of leftist publications.
