Incident 210: Indian Political App Tek Fog Allegedly Hijacked Trends and Manipulated Public Opinion on Other Social Media Platforms
Description: The Indian political social media app Tek Fog allegedly allowed operatives affiliated with the ruling political party to hijack social media trends and manipulate public opinion on other apps such as Twitter and WhatsApp, which opposition parties denounced as a national security threat.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Persistent Systems developed an AI system deployed by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, which harmed Indian voters , Indian social media users and Indian women journalists.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
210
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2020-04-28
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Social media operatives apparently affiliated to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) use a specialized app to hijack Twitter trends, harass critics, and spread propaganda through defunct WhatsApp accounts, according to a new investi…
The Wire investigates claims behind the use of ‘Tek Fog’, a highly sophisticated app used by online operatives to hijack major social media and encrypted messaging platforms and amplify right-wing propaganda to a domestic audience.
New Delh…
Technology is being used against the people, and those in the world’s largest democracy are the latest victims.
For much of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nearly eight years in power, the relationship between social media platforms, journal…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.