Days after The Wire retracted its stories on Meta and Tek Fog after they were found to be fake allegations against BJP based on fabricated evidence, the Editors Guild of India has issued a statement. While the Guild is quick in targeting right-wing media houses and remains silent on crimes committed by left-wing media, in a rare occasion, they said that they are withdrawing references to the fictious Tek Fog story by The Wire made in a statement issued in January 2022.
The Editors Guild also urged newsrooms to resist the temptation of moving fast on sensitive stories, circumventing due journalistic norms. The Guild said that its January statement had mentioned the Tek Fog story of Wire, along with other instances of harassment of woman journalists. But as now The Wire has decide to remove these stories as part of an internal review after the veracity of the reports were questioned, the Guild is also withdrawing references to these reports by The Wire.
EGI withdraws references to the Wire story in statement from Jan 2022 on online harrasment of women journalists. Urges newsrooms to resist the temptation of moving fast on sensitive stories, circumventing due journalistic norms. pic.twitter.com/D3lquITgjL
— Editors Guild of India (@IndEditorsGuild) October 28, 2022
In carefully chosen words that avoided criticising The Wire for publishing completely fake stories by fabricating evidence, the Guild said that it is disturbed by the turn of events. “The Guild is conscious of and emphasizes the need for extra care in investigative journalism, and urges newsrooms to resist the temptation of moving fast on sensitive stories, circumventing due journalistic norms and checks,” the statement added.
The Editors Guild however added that online trolling of women journalists remains an important issue, and better safeguards need to be put in place, including a strong and effective complaints and redressal system for victims. It is notable that in the fake Tek Fog story, The Wire had claimed that BJP was using a highly sophisticated automated app to direct hatred towards female journalists.
The Wire had claimed that BJP is able to manipulate major social media platforms using the so-called Tek Fog app bypassing all safety features available in the platforms. They claimed that with the tap of just one button on the app, BJP’s IT cell was able to ‘hijack’ the Twitter trends, allowed managing multiple WhatsApp accounts, create and delete Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and direct online harassment of anti-BJP journalists.
The entire Tek Fog story was based on only screenshots, without any other evidence, including the claim of targeting ‘anti-BJP’ women journalists. In the report, The Wire had claimed that they had monitored Twitter accounts of 280 woman journalists including replies to them, and had concluded that 18% of the replies came from accounts managed by Tek Fog, with many abusive comments.
However, the report didn’t include any other number on the issue, like how many accounts were managed by the ‘app’. Out of the so-called 280 accounts, they had randomly selected 32 accounts, and derived that they believed that 102,000 accounts were managed by Tek Fog. They didn’t have any evidence for this, they just randomly selected some numbers and arrived at this number with some calculations.
Editor Siddharth Varadarajan had posted a chart showing the extent of abusive messages sent to woman journalists using Tek Fog, without any evidence.
Here’s a preview of what @thewire_in’s #TekFog series will explain in Pts 2/3 in next days: A chart of how app was used to target @RanaAyyub @BDUTT @rohini_sgh @Nidhi @khanumarfa @bainjal @fayedsouza @MnshaP @smitaprakash & other women journos
— Siddharth (@svaradarajan) January 9, 2022
ICYM Pt 1: https://t.co/8LKOYOlDDx pic.twitter.com/YxBofIVLp0
The claims made by The Wire in the Tek Fog story and later in the Meta story were ridiculous and impossible that even die-hard Modi haters refused to believe them, questioned the claims, and exposed in detail how the claims can’t be true. There was overwhelming evidence back in January itself that the Tek Fog story is fake, but The Editors Guild, which is now advising media houses not to hurry with reports, had demanded Supreme Court probe into the allegations.
In a statement issued on January 11, the Guild had demanded that as influential people from the ruling party are involved with the Tek Fog app which is being used to harass woman journalists, Supreme Court should take cognisance of the matter and order a probe into it. The Editors Guild had said that the purpose of sending the hateful messages to female journalists using the app was to instil fear in them and to prevent them from expressing themselves freely and go about their jobs.
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
In the statement issued to condemn online harassment of women journalists, the Editors Guild mentioned two incidents, the Tek Fog story, and the claim that people were conducting ‘online auction’ of Muslim women using two open-source apps available on GitHub platform. Just like Tek Fog, the claims about these apps, Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, were completely false and baseless, and they were not ‘auctioning’ Muslim women as claimed by left-liberals and Editors Guild.
While the apps were not in good taste, all they did was take display pictures of women from social media accounts and add some text to them. There was no ‘auction’, one can’t auction people just by using their publicly available images.
Therefore, both the ‘instances’ based on which The Editors Guild of India had issued the statement on online harassment of female journalists were fake.
