After retracting the Meta and Tek Fog stories after they were proved to be fake and fictitious, left-wing propaganda portal The Wire has taken down another report where it had claimed that Alt News cofounder Mohammed Zubair was targeted by people linked with BJP using the Tek Fog app. The report was published on July 2, after Zubair was arrested on allegations of hurting religious sentiments.
This report was written by Devesh Kumar, Ayushman Kaul and Naomi Barton, the first two being the men behind the Tek Fog fiction published by The Wire, and the portal has also accused Devesh of supplying the fake documents they used in the Meta story. In the report, The Wire claimed Zubair was targeted by people linked with the BJP using thousands of Twitter bots managed by the Tek Fog app.
However, the story was taken down from the website on October 27. The webpage now displays a message that says, “This story has been removed from public view pending the outcome of an internal review by The Wire, as one of its authors was part of the technical team involved in our now retracted Meta coverage.”
Reportedly Mohammed Zubair was arrested on the complaint of an anonymous Twitter account who had complained about a 2018 tweet posted by him. A week after Zubair’s arrest, The Wire had published a report titled ‘10 Things You Need To Know About The Network Targeting Mohammed Zubair’, where it had doxed the person behind the annon Twitter account with the handle @balajikijaiin, and revealed that one Vikash Ahir of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha and Hindu Yuva Vahini in Gujarat was behind the account.
In the Tek Fog story published in January, The Wire had claimed that it is an app created by the BJP which has superpowers over social media, as it can manipulate major social media platforms by bypassing their inbuilt security measures. Relying on some ‘source’, 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 portal had claimed that hacking top global apps like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc are child’s play using the app, and all security features of those platforms vanish with this magical piece of software.
After making these tall claims about the app, the Wire found its ‘application’ against Zubair after he was arrested. They had claimed that just because a large number of Twitter users were targeting Zubair and his colleague Pratik Sinha, and many accounts were linked to Vikash Ahir through Twitter lists, many of them were not real humans but bots managed by Tek Fog.
The Wire had claimed that these bots were used to trend hashtags demanding the arrest of Zubair, despite the fact that there was massive outrage against the dubious fact-checker after he triggered nationwide riots against Nupur Sharma that claimed several lives. In its now-removed report, the portal claimed that out of 18,364 accounts which were trending such hashtags, as many as 61% of them, or 11,380, were part of the Tek Fog network.
They had claimed that this was the first time the app was activated after their stories on it. However, there was no explanation on how they determined that 61% of the accounts that posted those hashtags were bots managed by Tek Fog. There was no specific data to back that claim, just a vague argument that they displayed ‘bot-like behaviour’.
The Wire report included an image which looks similar to images used by Hollywood movies to represent technical mumbo-jumbo, without explaining what it means. It had listed some names, including OpIndia, and showed a large number of neuron-like links among them.
While OpIndia has extensively exposed propaganda and fake news spread by Alt News and Md Zubair, the portal was never any part of any organised online campaign against him that The Wire seemed to suggest through this image. It is possible that Twitter users were tagging OpIndia or replying to the portal while criticising Zubair, but that does not mean the portal was part of any campaign.
In conclusion, The Wire had categorically claimed that “Zubair was simultaneously targeted by thousands of TekFog accounts.” They had also alleged that Zubair was targeted by “hundreds of bot accounts affiliated with a man who has extensive links to the BJP.”
The portal had then claimed that it has “proved unequivocally that this was a malicious campaign conducted over several years by accounts displaying inauthentic behaviour.”
However, now that The Wire has been forced to take down the Tek Fog story after it has been found to be fake, the article that claimed Tek Fog to target Zubair has also been taken down. Along with the story, they also removed a video from YouTube where they had made the same claim. The video was still available till a few days ago, even after other videos on Tek Fog and Meta were removed.
