A day after ‘Twitter Files’ revealed how the US-based Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab provided a list of Indian accounts, associated with Hindu nationalism and BJP to the Twitter Trust and Safety Team, it has accused leftist propaganda outlet The Wire of providing the misleading dataset.
In a Medium blog post (archive) on Friday (March 3), DFRLab informed that it had received a dataset of 40,000 Twitter accounts in 2021 from one of the reporters of The Wire but it failed to meet its ‘research standards’.
“The dataset was part of an investigation into alleged coordinated disinformation and online harassment in India, conducted in parallel with the Indian outlet The Wire,” it said.
“One of their reporters at the time collected the dataset and shared it with our team; he attributed the tweets to the BJP, but his analysis failed to meet our research standards. The DFRLab, therefore, decided not to publish that investigation, terminating our collaboration with The Wire in October 2021,” it further emphasised.
The US-based DFRLab claimed that despite being well aware that the dataset could not be linked to the BJP, it nonetheless provided the list to social media platforms (including Twitter) as part of ‘due diligence.’
“As neither our internal research staff nor Twitter could find a connection between this particular dataset and the BJP, we decided to not move forward with the research,” it said.
“We stand by that decision. The Wire eventually published its own investigation in early 2022 but later retracted it after losing confidence in their report’s accuracy,” DFRLab highlighted.
The Wire, Devesh Kumar, and the Tek Fog saga
While the Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab did not explicitly mention the name of the reporter, it is crystal clear from its statement that the said scribe is none other than Devesh Kumar.
When the same statement is analysed in the context of retraction of The Wire‘s own investigation, it also becomes evident that the story is related to Tek Fog (a non-existent app that the leftist propaganda outlet claimed was used by BJP to spread disinformation).
It must be mentioned that the ‘lead investigator’ of the Tek Fog story was Devesh Kumar, and even conducted an ‘Ask me Anything’ session on the matter along with DFRLab’s south Asia research analyst, Ayushman Kaul.
Devesh had stated that he ran a ‘parallel IT cell’ against the BJP from his home and he deployed some 40 servers on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the task.
It is now clear that he fed the same list to the Digital Forensic Research Lab in the hopes of getting Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters censored on social media platforms.
Interestingly, Ayushman Kaul, who was an employee of DFRLab (April 2019-January 2022) at that time, worked in close coordination with Devesh Kumar. He had collaborated with The Wire on many tech-related projects, including the one on Tek Fog.
Kaul has contributed to multiple stories on The Wire such as ‘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”.
In fact, Devesh and Kaul, along with The Wire’s Naomi Barton, had claimed how Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair was ‘attacked’ online using Tek Fog. According to DFRLab, it stopped collaborating with The Wire in October 2021 after its story failed to meet its editorial standards.
Interestingly, this did not stop the leftist propaganda outlet from going ahead with its fake investigation and embarrassing itself in this process. Ayushman Kaul coincidentally also left the US-based organisation around the time The Wire retracted its stories.
As per his LinkedIn account, Kaul now works as a Senior Analyst at Logically. He joined the company in January 2022.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) later published a report citing the dubious Tek Fog allegation as an example of a lack of religious freedom in India
The revelations made by Twitter Files
On Thursday (March 2), a new tranche of ‘Twitter Files’ was released, which revealed how the US-based Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab flagged Twitter handles, allegedly associated with ‘Hindu nationalism’, and particularly with the BJP.
An analyst named Andy Carvin wrote to top Twitter executives on June 8, 2021, “Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k Twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behaviour… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”
3. DFRLab said it suspected 40,000 accounts of being “paid employees or possibly volunteers” of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023
But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics. https://t.co/B5L8KsY6ZH pic.twitter.com/vqijzp9BR2
The DFR Lab analyst flagged over 40,000 accounts, claiming that they were paid employees/ unpaid volunteers of India’s largest party, namely, the BJP. Contrary to the wishes of the DFR Lab, the top Twitter executives refused to act on the flagged Twitter accounts.
Opindia had found that at least 66 prominent and verified Indian Twitter handles were sent by US-funded Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab to the top executives of the social media giant.
