Thread by @vsirnate

I've read this piece TWICE today. This should be the biggest story in India. Democratic conversations on social media were hijacked and trends were manufactured using #TekFog. Social media users were promised a govt job and more money to basically spread BJP propaganda.

https://twitter.com/thewire_in/status/1479009004894314501

The piece very correctly points out that a partisan information environment was manufactured in India and that public narratives are engineered.

Many of the hashtags that were being auto-retweeted can be categorised as hate speech. I won't amplify them here. They're in the screenshots of the piece.

So the BJP's popularity isn't technically real in the digital world. It is very carefully manufactured.

The app also has abusive keywords that can be sent to selected demographics (like women journalists) en masse and in seconds.

The employers of these sock-puppets are:

Persistent Systems - an Indian-American publicly traded technology services company founded in 1990.

Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. : the company behind Sharechat, a popular Indian regional language social media platform funded by @Twitter.

Acc to the piece, Sharechat has a hyper-local focus (regional languages, very local content). It is worth 3 Billion dollars. Was used to spread hate messages.

Well done @thewire_in and team. Seriously these journalists deserve a standing ovation.

What we need to take away from here is that the BJP has really no concern for privacy and no devotion to the public it supposedly "governs" (if what it does can even be called governance). It is, as a party, solely interested in winning at all costs.

An operation of this size requires massive investment and the smartest minds. What saddens me about this piece is that there are so many brilliant minds and what they're engineering is a complete breakdown of Indian society.

You've got to have an immense amount of prejudice in you to be able to build something that throws people, who disagree with your political viewpoint, under the proverbial bus at every opportunity. To the extent that you build an app that can make this process efficient.

The irony is that this tech-wiz boom India has seen is a Nehruvian thing. But what these techies are actively building is a society that goes against every particle of what Nehru stood for.

I am not even sure that folks fully understand the consequences of what is transpiring. Building platforms for the deliberate and massive transmission of hate speech beyond traditional media like TV, radio, and newspapers, also amplifies the level of risk that targeted groups

live with.

Such actions deliberately and clearly place people at risk.