Investigation reveals BJP-linked operatives using sophisticated app to spread hate and malice
Online operatives affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are using a highly sophisticated app called Tek Fog to highjack social media (like Twitter, Sharechat, Facebook and Instagram) and encrypted messaging platforms (like WhatsApp and Telegram) in order to amplify right-wing propaganda, according to a 20-month-long investigation by The Wire, a part of which has been published till now.
Over a series of tweets in April 2020, an anonymous Twitter account, @Aarthisharma08 (which has since become @AarthiSharma8), claiming to be a disgruntled employee of the BJP’s Information Technology Cell (IT Cell), alleged the existence of a highly sophisticated and secret app called ‘Tek Fog’.
The person(s) claimed this app is used by political operatives affiliated with the ruling party to artificially inflate the popularity of the party, harass its critics and manipulate public perceptions across major social media platforms.
The news portal The Wire followed up with the Twitter handle and started an investigation on the activities of Tek Fog. After about 20 months, on January 6 this year, it came out with the first part of an investigative report, following up with the second part soon after.
Through its investigation, The Wire has uncovered to a large extent the malicious workings of Tek Fog. A full revelation is difficult, the portal has admitted, because of the secretive nature of the app, but with the help of @AarthiSharma8 and a few other people they put the investigative team in touch with, a sufficiently detailed picture has emerged.
According to the portal, “[t]he screencasts and screenshots of Tek Fog provided by the source highlighted the various features of the app and helped the team gain further insight into the operational structure of the network of cyber troops using it on a daily basis to manipulate public discourse, harass and intimidate independent voices, and perpetuate a partisan information environment in India”.
“Four alarming features”, as they have been termed, have been described—all involving automated processes to spread right-wing propaganda, hate, misinformation and disinformation in order to divide the people and turn them into believing that BJP and other right-wing organisations are the saviours of this country, with Muslims, women journalists, liberals and secular-minded people being particularly targeted.
In brief, the four features, as described in the report, are:
- Engineering of the public narrative by hijacking the ‘trending’ section of Twitter and ‘trend’ on Facebook, which the app accomplishes by using “the app’s in-built automation features” to “spam existing hashtags by accounts controlled by the app operatives”.
- Phishing ‘inactive’ WhatsApp accounts by hijacking ‘inactive’ WhatsApp accounts of private citizens and using those number them “to message their ‘frequently contacted’ or ‘all contacts’ “. Further, all these hijacked WhatsApp numbers are seeded to a “cloud-based political database”, to make them “available as potential targets in future harassment and trolling campaigns’ by the Tek Fog’s operatives.
- Using a database of private citizens for targeted harassment, by categorising people “according to their occupation, religion, language, age, gender, political inclination and even physical attributes” and then directing “abusive or derogatory” messages at them, with the abuses auto-generated by the app from connected Google Sheets.
- Importantly, the app leaves no trace behind by enabling “operatives to delete or remap all existing accounts at a moment’s notice”, thus allowing them to “to destroy all incriminating evidence of their past activity”.
The second part, published on January 10, described in detail the technology working behind the above-described actions. Among other things, hijacking of WhatsApp accounts, and modifying existing stories on websites to suit particular agendas and surreptitiously changing a part of those web pages’ URLs to direct unsuspecting readers (through posting the new links in messages on social media) to similar-looking pages have been described.
The third part would deal with “how Tek Fog has been deployed to engineer political narratives and target women journalists, especially those critical of the Narendra Modi government”.
Read the first part here
Read the second part here
Action demanded
Many ordinary and prominent people, including politicians from non-BJP parties, have spoken up against Tek Fog, expressing outrage and pressing for court-mandated investigations. The Supreme Court’s forming of a technical committee last year to investigate the Pegasus software spying scandal is being taken as an example.
On Tuesday, the Editors’ Guild of India demanded that the Supreme Court take cognisance of the matter and order a probe. In a press statement, it condemned “the continuing online harassment of women journalists, which includes targeted and organised online trolling as well as threats of sexual abuse”.
