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.

Tools

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
210
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2020-04-28
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
CSETv1, GMF, MIT

CSETv1 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Incident Number

210

Estimated Date

No

Estimated Harm Quantities

No

There is a potentially identifiable specific entity that experienced the harm

No

Harmed Class of Entities

No

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

4.1. Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale

Risk Domain

  1. Malicious Actors & Misuse

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Right-wing Indians have their own app to manipulate WhatsApp and Twitter
qz.com · 2022

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…

Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends
thewire.in · 2022

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…

India’s Tek Fog Shrouds an Escalating Political War
bloomberg.com · 2022

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.
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