On January 22nd, The Wire, an Indian media, published a heavy and long investigation report, revealing that the ruling party of Indian Prime Minister Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and Internet companies jointly developed and put into use an APP called "Tek Fog" to manipulate public opinion and crack down on political opponents by digital means.
Indian TV reported Tek Fog.
According to the report, in mid-2020, The Wire editorial department found a clue that a former employee of the IT department of the Bharatiya Janata Party broke the news that the Bharatiya Janata Party used this APP called Tek Fog to create momentum for right-wing politics and promote cyber violence. According to the report, through clues, the investigative reporter verified that this program called "Tek Fog" did exist. This mobile APP has many functions. Including the ability to automatically generate virtual phone numbers and email addresses, and then use the same terminal to register, log in and operate many social platform accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and generate a lot of similar information in a short time to achieve the effect of "washing the version" on social platforms.
The report mentioned that this APP has unified deployment and KPI indicators. Grass-roots operators will receive uniform labels at regular intervals-often the hottest political topic. Then they have to generate a copy related to the tag through the APP-support the Bharatiya Janata Party, or attack the opponents of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and then publish the copy, forward and share it on platforms such as Twitter, thus "hijacking" the hot search keywords of these platforms. For example, in the report, on May 4, 2020, the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a publicity campaign against the labor group, claiming that the largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress Party, was "anti-labor" and set a key word-"# Congress Party is anti-labor". This keyword was quickly forwarded by about 1,700 accounts and got more than 50,000 main tweets and retweets.
The survey report also found that the APP "Tek Fog" has a huge database of online users. Among them, the public figures on the Internet in India are divided into many categories-such as journalists, social media experts, religious leaders, movie stars, students … Different people are also labeled with different labels, such as gender, political orientation, religion, language and so on. According to the deployment, the operator can select groups with different labels to send public opinion messages on a large scale-for example, insulting words are put on anti-Modi female journalists in a certain period of time, and inflammatory words are put on certain groups of people in a certain period of time.
After this high-tech "public opinion war" weapon was exposed, the Modi government and its political parties have not commented so far. Many media have expressed great concern. For example, the French newspaper Le Monde called it creating a "toxic media environment"; Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper commented that this "encourages the ideology of hatred"; Bloomberg believes that this is the embodiment of India’s "political war escalation."
All these serve the political goals of the Bharatiya Janata Party: Since winning the election in 2014, Indian Prime Minister Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been committed to pursuing the political agenda of "Hindu nationalism", that is, the "transformation" plan of India, which is a mixture of identity politics and sectarian politics, with the aim of transforming India from a secular country with multiple religions and ethnic groups into a religious country ruled by a "Hindu nation" and pursuing the "dharma rule" of Hinduism.
For this long-sought political goal, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has carried out a series of controversial domestic policies, which has continuously promoted Hindu nationalism at the symbolic and practical levels. For example, in October 2019, Modi’s government abolished the autonomous status given to Indian-controlled Kashmir in the Indian Constitution; In November of the same year, Hindu nationalist groups won the lawsuit surrounding the former site of Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, and obtained court permission to build the Hindu Rama Temple on the site of the mosque demolished by Hindu militants in 1992. The following year, Modi personally came to lay the foundation stone for the new temple. From the second half of 2019 to the first half of 2020, Modi took advantage of the epidemic to launch the National Identity Act (CAA), which regarded many groups other than Hindus as "non-nationals", which triggered a series of protests, especially in Delhi, which caused ethnic conflicts between Hindus and Muslims who killed many people. In addition, during the Modi government’s administration, all parts of India also ushered in the climax of "social policy" to restrict the slaughter of cattle and the consumption of beef. A large number of Mughal city names have also been changed to "Hindu" names in these years.
In this series of operations, the Indian media ecology under the Bharatiya Janata Party is increasingly beneficial to Modi. In 2015, NDTV, which is famous for its anti-Modi, was rectified for national security and tax reasons; In 2019, the Indian government temporarily stopped buying advertisements in the biggest media-The Times of India, The Hindu and Telegraph, which was interpreted as a way to pressure these media that rely heavily on government advertising to change their reporting tendency.
At the same time, the online propaganda power of Bharatiya Janata Party has been expanding: on the one hand, the right-wing parent organization of Bharatiya Janata Party, the National Volunteer Service Corps (RSS), used its peripheral social organizations such as the All India Student Union (ABVP) and the World Hindu Lent (VHP) to launch propaganda, and besieged social forces opposed to Hindu right-wing politics on the grounds of "anti-state" since Modi came to power. In 2016, in line with the accusation of the Ministry of the Interior on the "incitement crime" of the left-wing students of Nehru University, they launched a network encirclement and suppression of Nida; Over the years, they have been besieging famous non-Hindu Bollywood actors, including Aamir Hussain Khan. The last time was in October 2021, Aamir Hussain Khan was regarded as an "anti-Indian" and was cursed to "go back to Pakistan" for posting a tweet calling for environmental protection and public morality during Hindu Diwali and not to set off fireworks on the road. Although many people in the society ridiculed these cyber violence as the work of Modi’s "Bhakt" (devout believers), there is obviously a special organization and coordination work behind it. The Bharatiya Janata Party even appointed Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga as the spokesman of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi. This gentleman is famous for violently humiliating anti-Indian people in various languages on the Internet. To some extent, the Indian Party gave him a post as a reward for his "public opinion firepower".
On April 3, 2021, in Buer, Saunal, India, Indian Prime Minister Modi held a rally during the parliamentary election campaign in West Bengal, and supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wore Modi’s mask.
The latest investigation report on the "TekFog" app confirms the real existence of these public opinion techniques. It can even be seen that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s public opinion offensive has "evolved" into a more high-tech approach, and it has skillfully cooperated with large enterprises, no longer relying entirely on the rumors of "sea tactics" and "network water army".
In The Wire’s investigation, the reporter found that the operation of this APP was suspected to involve two companies.
One is Persistent Systems, a joint venture between India and the United States. The company advertised that its founder Anand Bundhit had returned to India from Silicon Valley out of patriotism. The company itself has received many overseas investments including Twitter. Its main business is in the United States, with revenue exceeding $500 million per year. Since 2015, this company has won several information engineering bids. For example, in 2018, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare chose them to develop a personal health data system covering ten states. The Wire’s investigation found through informants that the company’s intranet has "Tek Fog" operating project documents. Although its spokesman said that "Tek Fog" has nothing to do with the company.
Another company is the popular local social platform "ShareChat" in India. This is the largest non-English social media in India at present. It claims to have nearly 200 million potential users in more than 14 languages in second and third tier cities. The Wire survey found that "Tek Fog" system can manipulate a large number of fake accounts on ShareChat and publish a large number of so-called "community content" in Hindi, Marathi and other languages, among which there are a lot of hate speech. Many similar remarks were first published on ShareChat, and then moved to other social platforms. Although ShareChat’s operation team denies its relationship with TekFog, in recent years, its team has repeatedly expressed its willingness to attract political parties to its own platform-bringing traffic and spreading political information.
In addition, the investigation team also found that Tek Fog can "hijack" some deactivated accounts of other social media. For example, its operators will secretly "hijack" accounts by posting videos with Trojans to some WhatsApp (Facebook’s communication software) accounts. After users of these accounts log out or change their mobile phones, they will use this account to post fake news and various public opinion propaganda information to their friends.
What is even more surprising is that in India, a populous country with a large labor reserve, the technology of "Tek Fog" is very intelligent. The investigation team found that the news generation function of artificial intelligence (even with American artificial intelligence news technology such as OpenAI or more advanced CTRL) may be added to the operation of this APP: automatically generate news pages with modified titles and contents that look unusually "real". For example, a news report that "communication software encourages right-wing extremism" can be changed to the title and content of "communication software encourages left-wing terrorism" and then pushed in large quantities. The information receiver who doesn’t pay close attention can’t see that this is fake news at all.
Further investigation by The Wire found that the "Tek Fog" APP and its operation team participated in many language violence incidents on the Internet in recent years. And many of its functions are specially designed for this kind of "cyber bullying". It can push insulting language generated around certain keywords for specific groups-for example, when its operators need to insult female journalists according to the deployment, they will select the tag combination of women and journalists in the list, and then the system will automatically appear words such as "Pakistani guy", "tits" and "randi", which can quickly generate large-scale push of insulting content. For example, according to The Wire reporter’s statistics, in May 2021, of the 4.6 million social media messages targeted at 280 most famous female journalists in India, more than 800,000 (more than 18%) were pushed by Tek Fog. Moreover, this software played an important role in the stigma of "bringing virus into India" against Muslims in 2020 and the ethnic violence in Delhi.
The media’s revelation of Tek Fog may be just the tip of the iceberg, but it makes people see the efficient combination of the right-wing religious nationalism politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, high-tech enterprises and even the Internet platform. Many functions of Tek Fog are built on the GoogleSheet service provided by Google. The technology platform suspected of supporting its operation accepted the investment from Twitter. In recent years, many reports have pointed out that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the National Volunteer Service Corps are developing their own organizations and teams in India’s electronic technology industry. In IT companies in Bangalore and other places, there are volunteer service groups similar to "fellowship" that regularly carry out activities to combine the daily life of the emerging middle class. With the continuous consolidation of Modi’s government position, Internet companies supported by financial capital have also formed alliances with Modi’s government’s political interests-"Persistant Systems" and "ShareChat" are both such examples-Modi’s government has helped Indian local Internet companies to crack down on foreign competitors and let the former occupy more markets. Local Internet companies help Modi government attract foreign investment into India, and at the same time help Modi’s political party to crack down on opponents and consolidate its ruling position with their own technology.
However, even if media reports point out that such an APP exists, Modi and his political forces can completely ignore it-as long as these public opinions do not hurt their votes, they will not pose a real blow to them. In the Pegasus monitoring software scandal in 2021, Modi’s government was exposed to use the monitoring system of Israeli companies to monitor opposition politicians and social people who were dissatisfied with its governance. At that time, Indian society was in an uproar, but the Modi government did not say much, and this incident did not make Modi’s administration encounter a crisis.
The Wire’s two-year investigation report on Tek Fog also reminds us that in recent years, people regard the extreme right wing or alternative right wing in Europe and America as a serious phenomenon and the most "cutting-edge" political issue. But what people may not realize is that in the former "third world" countries like India, the combination of technology and right-wing politics is actually more radical. In such an environment, once the combination of capital and technology and right-wing politics is not checked and stopped, its social and practical impact may be even more amazing.
林永健
