‘Aarthi Sharma’ Twitter account who formed the basis of ’20 month long investigation’ carried out by The Wire to conjure up ‘Tek Fog’ the super app with incredible powers which it claimed was created by the BJP to harass women and political opponents now stands suspended.
‘Aarthi Sharma’ Twitter account was created in April 2020 at the beginning of COVID pandemic where the user claimed they were disgruntled BJP IT Cell worker and were paid ‘Rs 2’ per tweet to harass women journalists and other political opponents. This ‘Aarthi Sharma’ was also the one to first and only time mention ‘Tek Fog’, a super app it accused the BJP of having created to harass women and journalists.
The obscure account was created in April 2022 and had only 121 tweets till July 31, 2020 when it became inactive. It was inactive till now when it suddenly got ‘suspended’. On April 24, 2020, ‘Aarthi Sharma’ invoked BJP IT Cel head Amit Malviya as an ‘all powerful individual’.
‘Aarthi Sharma’ was now officially the BJP whistleblower. When she invoked ‘Tek Fog’, many journalists had reached out to the account for more details, but the account never shared anything publicly.
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.
Based on the claims of Aarthi Sharma, The 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. You can read in detail our analysis on the absurdities of The Wire here.
The team that was involved in the ‘Tek Fog’ expose, comprising of Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar, was also associated with the Meta story published by The Wire which eventually turned out to be based on completely fabricated documents. In Meta story, The Wire had accused BJP’s Amit Malviya of having super powers conferred by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, of getting any post removed at will within seconds. Doubling down on allegations, The Wire had rejected Meta’s clarification that the source documents they based their story on were fabricated. The articles were later taken down when those ‘experts’ who were used by The Wire to claim their sources were authentic, said that they did not made the claims The Wire had attributed to them.
Following the Meta controversy, The Wire also took down its Tek Fog articles and their videos from YouTube where they had made these fantastical claims. Till now, The Wire has not apologised to those it had wrongly accused of being vindictive and evil. Devang Dave, accused by The Wire as being brains behind the Tek Fog has decided to take legal action against the publishers.
Meanwhile, turns out the profile picture used by ‘Aarthi Sharma’ was of another girl who currently lives in Australia. The image was used without her consent. Ironically, the Twitter account that was being hailed as ‘whistleblower’ for ‘BJP harasses women journalists’ used a profile picture of another woman without her consent. So much for ethics, really.
Now, the ‘source’ on whose basis The Wire had written the entire Tek Fog fake news has had their account ‘suspended’ on Twitter.
