The Wire's Meta story has opened a can of worms. After evidence of fabrication, the portal has retracted its Meta & "Tek Fog" stories, written by their tech journos Devesh & Ayushman Kaul. Devesh has deleted all SM handles but not the digital footprints of a mess left behind. 1/
This thread is going to unveil the vicious project of The Wire's journos called "UrbanNazi", in largely two parts- (1) The bot attack (2) Anti-CAA protest digitial-mind-hack 2/
(1) The bot attack: The Wire published much talked about 'BJPHateMachine' mysterious app Tek Fog on 06Jan'22. After a week on 15-Jan, the duo writers discussed a lot about their project through their reddit handle - u/onosmosis & u/sourceofx47. 3/
Though Devesh's other sm handle goes with the same id (onsomosis), this is just to establish that indeed he is behind this id (check pic too). Since his projects may have colab with more ppl/team, let's call it Devos (Devesh+u/onsomosis) for easy understanding. 4/
u/onosmosis reddit handle is deleted, so I searched for archive data and found some interesting posts. One of the post suggested that he is running a "parallel IT Cell" against "BJP IT Cell", which has 40 servers & monitoring 2 lakh "bot" accounts. 5/
Some archive links led me to live links and I was able to retrieve some of his reddit conversations. Here in these snapshots, Devos is explaining the modus operandi of his "IT Cell". He claimed to have suspended/deleted 1.2Lac twtr a/c of what he analyzed as BJP IT Cell. 6/
The method he/his algo followed was identification, and mass reporting of handles through bots. When pointed out that it's unethical even if he believes that it's "BJP bots", he responded with conviction that he is not violating twtr rules, rather doing what they should do. 7/
In this conversation of Dec'19, he admitted that "we are not living in an ideal scenario so decided to manipulate Twitter accounts run by BJP IT Cell" and posted invoices of AWS servers which is "worth spending in this battle". 8/
There are some posts that suggested that Devos managed to manipulate Twitter polls also against "godi media" through his algo. e.g. this poll by @IMinakshiJoshi was claimed to be manipulated with the conviction that "they are lacking strength, don't worry". 9/
and this poll by @sudhirchaudhary has been claimed to be manipulated to make the pro-govt-side (support to CAA) loose. 10/
Interestingly OpIndia has reported this story in brief as "one reddit user" is claiming to manipulate twitter's opinion against CAA/NRC, assuming it was not popularised at that time who was behind this user. 11/
So on the contrary same people who worked behind the "BJP IT Cell secret Tek Fog" story on Jan 22, eventually was/or/is running an Anti-BJP IT Cell, rigging popular opinions and amplifying anti-CAA emotions during protests in Dec'19, Jan-Feb'20. 12/
If this was not enough, Devesh claimed that for security reasons he run servers on the distributed n/w across five IITs & NITs through alumni connection. 13/
In Jan'20 UrbanNazi published another story where they claimed to have analyzed 'IT Cell'. In a sample size of 2.7L a/c BJP has 18K (~7%) while INC has just 147 (~0.1%) in 1.2L sample, based on key words,bio,pattern which can vary as the results seem to have a clear bias. 14/
About the funding of these servers and all, Devos said that its self-funded through two of his consulting jobs, besides generous donors. 15/
Before we end this part, let me add here that Samarth Bansal @PySamarth has written a detail critic piece of Devesh/Ayusman's "Tek Fog" story, point by point challenging the technicalities and methodology. You may find it interesting. 16/
How badly do the claims look bizarre, some critical qu: a) who authorized an external party to remove a massive 1.2L a/c through a program? b) what if the features used in "identification" to "bots/fake users" were not Twitter's policy violation? 17/
e.g. the program filtered a few thousand users and they have this (pic) word cloud in tweets. Now for that matter every other user uses Hindu, Modi, Ram, Army etc. c) So what about the casualty of genuine users, given the bias in the objective? d) how IIT & NIT servers used? 18/
e) how come entire process was not twitter API policy violation that only grants research/study purposes? f) Was @thewire_in aware of these individual projects before hiring journos or this was only reason to be qualified? Tagging @Policy @elonmusk @MIB_India @GoI_MeitY FYI. 19/
This is the end of 1st part (The bot attack). In the next thread, will talk about another project "Anti-CAA protest digital-mind-hack" under UrbanNazi where he/they is/are "fighting against the fascist govt until the govt goes out of power". Till then, absorb part 1. 20/
Meanwhile, if you are feeling generous, here is the link to support the efforts: https://t.co/6LEOlFCHdq Pls share/RT/QRT/Tag authorities, and your fav handle. 21/
rzp.io/l/thehawkeyex
