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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Political violence |
|---|---|
| located: | India |
| editor: | Tish Sanghera |
India’s ruling party, the BJP, has created an app that automates hate campaigns on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp. A whistleblower working at the heart of the BJP’s digital wing claims that this app - known as ‘Tek Fog’ - can quickly create and delete accounts that carry out online harassment, bypass Whatsapp’s security measures to send unauthorised messages from phone numbers, hijack online conversations and much more.
These are the findings of a two-year investigation by independent Indian media outlet The Wire, led by two researchers, Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar. They have detailed how workers in the digital wing would check the app on a daily basis and receive instructions to carry out tasks that would “manipulate public discourse, harass and intimidate independent voices, and perpetuate a partisan information environment in India.” For example, the app would hijack Twitter’s ‘auto retweet’ function or spam existing hashtags to manipulate trending topics and troll users.
Using an extensive database of private citizens categorised according to their occupation, religion, language, age, gender, political inclination and “physical attributes like complexion and even breast size,” app users sent automated replies with phrases dictated by a central document to harass key individuals. Many of these messages were filled with vitriol and abuse, especially targeting Muslims and female journalists whose work runs counter to the right-wing Hindutva BJP narrative. Researchers found that about 18 percent of the 4.6 million replies received by 280 of the most retweeted women journalists on Twitter over 5 months were made from accounts managed via the Tek Fog app.
“I am not surprised,” tweeted female journalist Rana Ayyub, whose tweet replies were filled with the most accounts handled by the Tek Fog app. “From porn videos, misogynistic, communal abuse, character assassination, I have seen it all, enabled by the government. The #tekfog investigation by the Wire validates what most women journalists have flagged for years.”
Though the BJP’s digital arm’s use of coordinated online propaganda and hate campaigns is well established (especially their use of Google sheets to share pre-approved tweets and messages to their army of online mouthpieces), the extent of the app’s ability to manipulate and bypass online security measures is shocking. The investigation claims, for example, that the app allows its users to hijack 'inactive' WhatsApp accounts of private citizens and use their phone numbers to message their contacts.
Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s main opposition party, Congress, has called the Tek Fog app “one of several factories of hate” set up by the BJP. His comments come in the wake of the recent ‘Bulli Bai’ app case, in which three people have been arrested for uploading doctored images of Muslim women, including several journalists, and putting them up ‘for sale’. ‘Bulli’ is a pejorative term for muslim women in Hindi.
Calls for a Supreme Court investigation into the Tek Fog app and its links to the ruling party are growing. For the world at large, this is yet another stark warning that India’s political and communal polarisation is growing worse than ever.
Image by: Florian Olivo
