After retracting the Meta and Tek Fog stories after they were proven to be fake and fictious, now left-wing propaganda portal The Wire has also removed several videos related to these stories. The Wire had particularly published several videos on Tek Fog, where their editorial and technical team had discussed and ‘explained’ how they ‘exposed’ the so-called Tek Fog app and how ‘BJP was using this super app to manipulate social media’.
The portal had also hosted discussions with panellists from outside on the two issues, where everyone had agreed to slam the Modi government based on the fake claims made by The Wire in their fictious stories about BJP having superpowers on social media. However, now all the videos, originally uploaded on YouTube, are no longer available for the public. While the videos have not been deleted, they have been marked as private, which means the general public can’t watch them.
Among the videos that have been retracted now by Wire, one was an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session conducted on Reddit and YouTube. In this AMA, Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar, the authors of the Tek Fog fiction, went live with Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan, where Kaul and Kumar answered ‘technical questions’, and Vardarajan answered ‘non-technical, editorial policy’ related questions as he is not a ‘tech person’. However, now the video is not available on YouTube as it has been made private.
While publishing the Tek Fog story, had also hosted a video where they explained their claims about the ‘app’. In the discussion titled “Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends”, Sumedha Pal, Siddharth Varadarajan, Devesh Kumar and Ayushman Kaul discussed the findings of their ‘investigation’ which they claimed went on for two years, and also ‘explained’ how the app worked. This video also has been made private on YouTube. However, for some reason, it is still available on Facebook.
The Wire had also hosted a panel discussion on the Tek Fog story in January, where Sophie Zhang, Billy Perrigo, Robert Baptiste, Tarunima Prabhakar, V. Anand and Sagarika Ghose had joined with The Wire team to agree on how dangerous the Tek Fog app was, based on claims made by the portal. That video also has been made private on YouTube. But like the above-mentioned video, this video is also still available on the Facebook page of The Wire at the time of publishing this report.
Similarly, the Wire had done an explainer on Meta story also, where the portal had alleged that BJP’s Amit Malviya has been given powers to remove content on Instagram as per his wishes. That video is also no longer available now.
While the portal has removed all YouTube videos on their Tek Fog story, a video where they had claimed that this ‘app’ was used to target Mohammad Zubair of Alt News, is still there on the platform. They had claimed this in a report published after Zubair was arrested following riots triggered by his tweets on Nupur Sharma.
The Wire had claimed that the “arrest of India’s most prominent fact-checker, Mohammed Zubair, is the product of a long-running campaign by a network of accounts linked to the ruling BJP”. It had further claimed, “One of the weapons they used was Tek Fog – a secretive app that targets government critics and subverts public discourse on a massive scale”.
Based on the fact that several Twitter users had criticised Zubair, and had called for his arrest for hurting religious feelings of Hindus, Wire had concluded that it was part of a well planned conspiracy to target him, and the Tweets came from Tek Fog. The portal claimed that there were hundreds of bots operated by Tek Fog that posted hashtags and tweets calling for arrest of Zubai. By this, the Wire tried to claim that the case was Zubair was arrested because hashtags calling for his arrest were trending on Twitter.
The existence of Tek Fog has been debunked now, and The Wire has been forced to retract its stories. The claims that a super app like Tek Fog is needed to engineer trending hashtags also have been debunked thoroughly by many experts, as these are actually organic mass campaigns where thousands of supporters participate.
Another interesting point is that after The Wire has retracted its Tek Fog story and removed all its videos from YouTube, another leftist portal Newslaundry has pulled down an interview they did with The Wire ‘tech experts’ on Tek Fog. The interview titled ‘NL Interview: Tek Fog exposé writers on BJP IT cell’ has been removed from the website, and the title of the webpage now says ‘NL Interview: The interview with Devesh Kumar and Ayushman Kaul on ‘Tek Fog exposé’ has been pulled down’. While the video of the interview is no longer available, snippets of the same which were posted on Facebook are still there.
