ShareChat on October 18 released a statement against The Wire asking them to take down an article by Dinesh Kumar and other reports from public consumption. This comes days after Meta and The Wire were engaged in controversy after Wire filed an article alleging that if BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya reported any Instagram post then it is immediately deleted and denied review.
The second statement by ShareChat said that they are taking this step in light of doubts and concerns raised in public regarding the authenticity of the materials used in such reports and the verification practices followed by the organization. The article that ShareChat has mentioned in their statement is from earlier this year where The Wire claimed that the application Tek Fog used ShareChat to seed hate speech.
The article published in January claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party used an app called 'Tek Fog' to artificially inflate the party's popularity, manipulate public perception and harass BJP critics. These claims were made based on the Tweets by Aarthi Sharma who claims to be an ex-employee of the BJP IT cell.
The source of the article claimed that Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. the company behind ShareChat were involved as the employer of the app operatives or social media managers that were working for the BJP IT cell. They also claimed that the app operatives used ShareChat to test and curate fake news, hate speech and political propaganda before sending it to other popular social media platforms.
To counter this ShareChat had earlier responded to the Wire stating that they have no relation with the creators of 'Tek Fog'. In the statement, they also gave out the actions they are taking against the spreading of fake news on their app.
The company says the same in the current statement released by the company, they said, "ShareChat has never engaged with any person or company/organisation that is associated with or working on the mysterious “Tek Fog” application that has been conjured up by The Wire."
They have asked Wire to take down the article and other reports so that the public cannot access them as the facts covered there are incorrect.
Tek Fog Features
The app requires three one-time passwords to login to the app dashboard and it uses a firewall that will prevent access outside a set facility. According to the report, one of the most important features of the app is that it enables hacking of the 'trending' section of Twitter and Facebook. It can also bypass many security features of all social media apps. But these claims couldn't be verified by Wire.
It has in-built automation features that allow users to send out tweets and share tweets and posts by accounts controlled by the app operatives.
The second distinctive feature that the article discusses is phishing or hacking 'inactive' WhatsApp accounts of private citizens and sending out messages to their contact lists. This helps the operatives to get the personal information of targeted users and add it to their database. But this seems difficult to be done without the device of the targeted person being infected by trojan or some malware. Especially when hacking into an end-to-end encrypted app like WhatsApp.
The third feature that the article mentions is that the app showcases an extensive and dynamic cloud database of citizens sorted on the basis of occupation, religion, language, gender, age, political inclination and even physical attributes. They could also send out automated targeted harassment messages to a list of targets that are maintained in Google Sheets. But, automated replies on Twitter did not require a bot as it is a feature that is offered by Twitter.
The fourth feature that The Wire claims is that the app offers the ability for operatives to delete, restore or remap all of the existing accounts at a moment's notice. But this feature also could not be verified by The Wire.
Despite the questions that were raised because of this report and on this report the main question that remains is why has ShareChat pushed out their statement today, months after the original article was filed.
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