In the controversy surrounding the Prime Minister’s visit to Punjab, an investigation into a secret app that spams and trolls thousands has gone ignored by the big media, notes the Delhi Union of Journalists. Painstaking investigation of the app Tek Fog, by two technical researchers for the Wire, reveals how tech is being used to pursue a political agenda and target people, including journalists. Tek Fog is designed to “highjack the ‘trending’ section of Twitter and ‘trend’ on Facebook….to ‘auto-retweet’or ‘auto-share’ the tweets and posts of individuals or groups and spam existing hashtags…”says the Wire expose. Individual operatives can use the app “ to generate ‘temporary’ email addresses, activate phone numbers and bypass programming limitations, and email and OTP verification set by What’s App Facebook, Twitter and Telegram.” Dangerously, the app enables operatives to hijack inactive WhatsApp numbers, steal data about their contacts and send them messages.
It creates a cloud database that categorises people by religion, language, age, gender and political leanings, so that they can be messaged suitably. Women journalists have been prime targets of the app. The Wire investigation lists women journalists who received up to one million abusive tweets between January and May 2021. They include Rana Ayyub, Barkha Dutt, Nidhi Razdan, Rohini Singh, Swati Chaturvedi, Sagarika Ghose, Manisha Pande, Faye D’Souza, Arfa Khanum Sherwani and Smita Prakash. The Wire has identified two private companies, Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd, that are reportedly responsible for developing the app. Mohalla Tech is the company behind Sharechat, a leading regional language social media platform which is funded by Twitter. Sharechat works in 24 languages and claims it has 160 million users. Persistent Systems is based in Nagpur and allegedly has close links with the Bharatiya Janata Party through its current election manager in Maharashtra.
The companies are denying involvement with Tek Fog. In a detailed response Sharechat claims it systematically takes down hate speech and misinformation. However, DUJ also notes with alarm the inadequate response of social media companies to complaints against hate accounts, fake accounts and fake news. Alt News has traced several such accounts on Facebook and Twitter but little action has been taken by tech companies. DUJ calls for an urgent inquiry by the Supreme Court into the role of social media and tech companies in amplifying the crime of Hate Speech.
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The Editors Guild of India Condemns Harassment of Women
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. What is further disturbing is that most of these attacks are targeted at journalists who have been outspokenly critical of the current government and the ruling party, in an effort to silence them under the intimidation of such attacks. This is a travesty of all democratic norms, and in violation of law.
The latest instances of such organised trolling and harassment are revealed by the investigations done by The Wire, which laid bare an extensive and well funded network built around an app, Tek Fog, which steals unused WhatsApp accounts to send out toxic messages to targeted journalists. The purpose of these deeply hurtful messages was to instill fear in them and to prevent them from expressing themselves freely and go about their jobs.
According to the reports, several women journalists were subjected to thousands of abusive
tweets. There were also the recent instances of online auction of Muslim women by at least two open source apps on the GitHub platform, which included journalists critical of the government. Though law enforcement agencies have arrested those supposedly behind such apps, there is need for further investigation in order to ensure that all those behind such despicable acts, even beyond those arrested, are brought to justice.
Editors Guild demands that the government takes urgent steps to break and dismantle this misogynistic and abusive digital eco-system, and that thorough investigations are carried out to identify and punish the culprits and entities behind it. Further, given the allegations that there may be the involvement of influential people linked to the ruling party with the app Tek Fog, the Guild demands that the Supreme Court of India takes cognisance of the matter and order a probe into it.
