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Days after The Wire retracted its reporting on the Met story and ordered an “internal investigation” into the fiasco, the left-wing propaganda website also quietly retracted its months-long report on Tech Fog, an app it claimed was used by the BJP to it manipulates trends and automatically spews hate online.
Citing an August 2020 tweet and a ‘source’, The Wire claimed that the BJP was using a software called Tek Fog, headed by BJP leader Devang Dave, which had unprecedented power to manipulate online trends and spew hate to attack its detractors. . Although Dave vigorously denied the allegations in an email to Wire, they continued to publish the story.
In a report published in January 2022, Wire claimed that the so-called Tech Fog app allowed the BJP to “hijack” Twitter trends, allowed it to manage multiple WhatsApp accounts and directly harass anti-BJP journalists online. The report claims that the app could bypass all kinds of security features that major social media platforms have. According to The Wire, Tek Fog had some kind of superpower that gave him capabilities that even the US NSA didn’t have. The Wire stated that hacking top apps like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. child’s play using Tech Fog, and that all the security features of those platforms disappear with this magical software.
However, within days, OpIndia poked holes in The Wire’s report on Tek Fog, highlighting how the left-wing propaganda website’s claims about the superpower app didn’t add up and how the app might be a figment of their fertile imaginations. You can read the full rebuttal here. But it took 10 months, and the Meta fiasco that led to The Wire also retracting its Tek Fog stories pending an “internal investigation.” By the way, Devesh Kumar, the staff of The Wire who co-wrote the Meta stories, also co-wrote the Tek Fog stories.
On October 23, 2022, The Wire pulled its Tech Fog stories, with links to Tech Fog stories on its website flashing a message. Here’s a screenshot of the message in one of the reports published by The Wire.
While retracting the Meta and Tech Fog stories is an attempt by The Wire to save face by pretending to be transparent and concerned about journalistic ethos, the original lie they peddled has traveled far and wide, finding its way onto global platforms and the organization’s biases which used it to the end to tarnish India’s reputation.
How dubious international organizations and left-wing media helped spread the Tech Fog lie
Freedom House, the dubious human rights “watchdog” that supported violent protests against a law that gave citizenship rights to persecuted minorities such as Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians from Islamic states in India’s neighborhood, dropped the country from “free” to ” partially”. free” in 2021. And in 2022, the organization held up India as “partly free,” relying on prejudice and baseless accusations, including The Wire’s Tek Fog story, to claim that BJP members were using it to shape public narratives and manipulate social media opinions.
Similarly, other organizations that have been pathologically anti-India, especially after Modi became Prime Minister, cited the Tek Fog story as one example of India’s downgrade on their farcical indices. For example, Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2022 Press Freedom Index dropped India from 142 last year to 150 this year, placing it even below despotic and dictatorial regimes like those of the UAE and Hong Kong, where they thrive against members of the press. Yes that.
A report published on HV English cites The Wire’s Tek Fog story to highlight how it has played a role in lowering India’s ranking from 142 last year to 150 in 2022. In fact, The Wire itself relayed its ‘investigation’ about Tech Fog, which is now suspected of being a pure fraud, when they reported on India’s downgrade on the Media Freedom Index earlier this year.
India’s supposed drop in the ‘democracy index’ and ‘press freedom index’ was repeated without difficulty by Indian politicians and other commentators on global platforms, who want to prove that India lives under some dystopian dictatorship, and only the white masters from the West can come and save it. the poor brown people oppressed by the evil regime headed by PM Modi.
Washington Post, Bloomberg and Wikipedia published The Wire’s Tech Fog claims that are now suspected to be outright hoaxes
Not only these two indices, several other global platforms have cited the Tech Fog fiction to paint a negative picture of India, such as the Washington Post, Bloomberg and others, who have reinforced The Wire’s barely credible claims that the BJP was using the app to manipulate trends. on social media and fire up your detractors with hate online. The list is indicative, but provides a window into how the lie has spread far and wide through the nexus of left-wing global organizations.
Tim Culpan and Andi Mukherjee, two Bloomberg columnists, co-authored an article based on a Wire story about Tek Fog, which was published by several media outlets. They made claims that even Wire didn’t make about the so-called app. They claimed that it is a browser based application and it is very powerful.
Making more outlandish claims about an app that doesn’t exist, they wrote: “Tek Fog is a military PSIOP – psychological operations – weapon. Until now, such a capability has only been available to state actors for use against hostile populations, they said further citing a security researcher.
The Wire’s Tek Fog fabrications have also been used as citation and evidence for multiple Wikipedia articles portraying India in a bad light. Such articles discuss how the standards of freedom and democracy in India are falling and how the Modi government is solely responsible for it. For example, a Wikipedia article titled “Freedom of the Press in India” is quoted by The Wire to make this point.
It is worth noting that Wikipedia is still misunderstood as a neutral platform by millions of unsuspecting Internet users around the world, when in reality it has been taken over by ideologues belonging to the leftist camp, who reinforce lies and propaganda with leftist outfits and publications. Wikipedia is dominated by left-leaning editors and therefore several Wikipedia pages are biased, with information added according to the whims and fancies of left-leaning editors.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer involved with Wikipedia, has gone on the record to talk about the internet encyclopedia’s bias. Sanger wrote that it had long since forgotten its original policy of presenting information from a neutral point of view, and today the crowdsourced online encyclopedia “can be counted on” to cover politics from a “liberal point of view.”
The Wire’s Take Fog story is a perfect example of what Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels famously said he proposed: “If a lie is repeated a thousand times, it becomes the truth.” Wire may have retracted his article for now, but the intended lie and propaganda has become part of history and continues to be quoted on various global platforms, some of which are listed above.
How The Editor’s Guild of India Promoted The Vire’s Lies
Apart from the damage that The Wire’s propaganda article has done to India’s reputation, let us also recall that the Editors’ Guild of India issued a “courageous” letter condemning the imaginary attack on journalists that The Wire conjured up back in January 2022.
The Editors’ Association of India condemns the continued harassment of women journalists online, which includes targeted and organized online trolling, as well as threats of sexual harassment. pic.twitter.com/kt7abHiofi
— Editors Guild of India (@IndEditorsGuild) January 11, 2022
Will they now retract the condemnation and instead write another letter condemning the wire? It is anyone’s guess what The Editor’s Guild of India will do after The Wire is exposed for its false and biased reporting.
However, the Tek Fog episode serves as a cautionary tale for Indians, considering that it is just one propaganda piece by a left-wing media that has caused so much damage to India’s reputation globally. Readers can guess how much damage the entire network of left-wing publications has done over the years.
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