Tek Fog in Action: Targeting Women Journalists
thewire.inRegardless of the current iteration. Regardless of this specific tech capability and how it is currently used in this specific country I am asking myself how a society can protect itself against this.
If topics are manufactured and outrage is being artificially generated in that fashion classic media will probably jump onto the bandwagon because doing so will increase advertising clicks and views. It will increase revenue for said media outlets. Also social networks have every incentive to not quell these things as they drive engagement and with that advertising revenues. The same for video platforms. Basically (nearly) any ad driven revenue stream will want to participate. Thos will be adding fuel to the fire and just increase the reach of the fabricated stories as well as the outrage and the accompanying division of societies. Creating measures to effectively quell such things on the other hand will (nearly) inevitably create measures of mass censorship that once implemented will one day be abused because I have yet to see an example of humans not using any weapon/means to further their agenda.
So the question remains what societies, as well as everybody for themselves, can do to protect themselves against these forms of manipulations.
I have to admit that I do not have a good idea what could work. And what the side effects of doing something (as well as not doing something) could be.
It's worth noting that our society has been struggling against malicious forms of political discourse for millennia.
Much progress against malicious political discourse has been made by philosophical and cultural innovations that aim to influence the behaviours of politically empowered elites, and to develop systematic approaches to 'fairness' in decision making (logicism, empiricism) as well as systems of political and personal ethics/morality (Stoicism, Utilitarianism etc..).
Today, these same values need to have a broader base within our society; most urgently within those communities who are most influential in driving technological change, but also within the wider community of those who are funding and using these technologies that have proven so effective at industrializing harmful political discourse.
I don't usually post on political topics with my main account but the title is confusing and is in my opinion misleading.
The Tek Fog app, according to this report, targets people including women journalist who are critical of current PM of India or the Party BJP.
Most journalists in India are not critical of PM Modi but a few of them are, and in fact you will never find this report on the Indian MSM.
A better title would be:
Tek Fog targeting Anti-BJ/ Anti-Modi journalists in India.
True, the purpose seems to be to silence voices critical of the BJP. The trolling software maintains databases of many categories of people to help customize the harassment.
But this article talks specifically about attacking women journalists in particular, using targeted language like calling them prostitutes or referring to their specific body parts or skin color, etc. The headline seems fine to me.
Correcting you, this was indeed reported in the MSM. For example see: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tek+fog&t=canonical&iar=news&ia=ne...
Tek fog is essentially automated trolling used to target political opponents.
The previous articles by TheWire on this were of better quality and didn't seem to stretch facts to push a narrative.
They have given no evidence that only women journalists were targeted primarily.
They sound like one of the opinion pieces saying "Hurricane Katrina strikes ..., women specifically targeted/affected".
I will note that regardless of my criticism of the linked article, I agree that Tek Fog can have significantly adverse impact on the quality of discourse and whether its usage is legal is something that needs to be brought to the court.
The article describes targeted language like calling the journalists prostitutes or referring to their specific body parts or skin color, threatening rape, etc. How is this not targeting women specifically?
This is classic Gamergate style attack, with misogyny, doxxing, etc. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign...]
Might be useful for some folks to know lakh means 100000.
Perhaps we need an antifa style hacking group to take down infra/tech like this which is inherently anti-democratic ? I'd love someone to destroy that cloud database and put Tek Fog back at square 1.
There would be another one if there isn't already. The core way of stopping this is taking online discussions to more than 3-4 platforms that can be easily dominated with modest resources many of which actively enable it through providing APIs and turning a blind eye to bot traffic.
This is not cool at all.
It's no wonder that so many people struggle with the effects of trauma from (seemingly omnipresent) misogynistic abuse.
Is there any escaping it? Any way to fight back?
Yikes - Seeing it documented in India this way implies it's being done everywhere at some scale, likely not just against Women as well. The centralization and growth of walled gardens has fed some very nasty side effects.
What whatsapp vuln are they using to take over the victims account?
OP - don’t take it personal if this thread is flagged and removed from the front page. Yes, it is interesting and yes it has a fascinating tech angle to it. Especially interesting for me is how easily subverted social media is with the right tech.
But you know who this is indirectly critical of even if he is not mentioned. There are enough devotees of that person on HN that every thread tangentially involving him becomes flagged and removed eventually. This appears to be a chilling effect on the discussion, but moderators are very reluctant to step in. They would much rather there was no discussion of Indian politics at all, given that every conversation becomes so heated.
Your comment broke the site guidelines in its own right. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
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I am not a fan of any of our political parties because they are all crooks.
Having said that, I don't consider The Wire to be a dispassionate source when it involves he who you don't want to name.
I'm not interested in who wins the election because I can count on any government to negatively impact my life by eroding my ability to support myself and my family through taxation, corruption and government ineptitude. Our currency will be devalued with each passing year, and most of our savings will not keep up.
Having further clarified this, I fully expect the current ruling party to engage in technology fuelled surveillance and other privacy related invasions because the megalomania is clear and apparent from their rhetoric and overall positioning.
I also know that they are probably amongst the most popular leaders in the world, enjoying above 75% popularity in the general population. I have zero respect for the competence of the opposition because they lack pragmatism, skill or political instincts to change this. What we have instead is an embarrassing coalition of clowns.
Government will only continue to disappoint, and partisans are part of the problem. I only take seriously issues that are framed in the manner of citizen vs government.
Having qualified all of this - this story is unsurprising and entirely believable.
The story is unbelievable- in that this is the way tech is being employed. It’s a combination of the most sinister and banal at the same time.
It’s having an auto complete feature for creating better hate speech.
The politics is one thing the tech is another.
Politics is how power is distributed, and technology enables power.
They're intrinsically linked
> enjoying above 75% popularity in the general population.
What is that number based on? Their vote share in the 2019 general elections was ~37%.
The 37% number is based on political dynamics like the popularity of regional political parties and whether or not the political machinery is contesting in all parts of the country.
If you look at polling organizations that do "approval ratings" type of poll, they have been 50-70% for years. The recent West Bengal incursion is probably a good example, they went from no presence to becoming the primary opposition.
In a country where even exit polls are hilariously inaccurate, I am not going to pay any attention to what approval ratings say.
Could you please explain this apparent Indian in-joke for us in the rest of the world? It would make understanding your concerns easier and would give us an interesting sight of what happens around the world instead of just spreading hush-hush conspiracy theories.
The BJP, India’s ruling party whose leader is Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has an active paid “IT cell” and a coordinated army of trolls. The party also has enthusiastic civilian supporters whom opponents call “Bhakts” or devotees of Modi. These people regularly mobilize to discover and shut down critical commentary anywhere on the Internet.
The commenter is saying that HN is often subjected to these devotees’ campaigns. He is probably right, in my opinion. I am Indian and most of my friends and family are devotees. They often coordinate their outrage on WhatsApp groups. Someone will post links to critical articles and the others will jump on them.
Why are people so devoted?
Religion. Hindutva - an extremist offshoot of Hinduism in this case.
The App in question is used by IT Cell, Internet Army of trolls, of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) with Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, as its leader. What this commenter insinuated is that quite a few of those trolls are active on HN too and they mass flag such, supposedly, Anti-Modi articles and get them removed effectively.
As an Indian, I do feel they are right since I’ve rarely seen such posts on homepage. Even this one, I found in Second Chance.
I’m not Indian, I’ve never been there and I have like one Indian friend living in India in total, so I have no dog in the fight. But this kind of tribal warfare on HN does irk me, and I do often flag these stories as a result. Your meta comment not contributing much of anything other than slinging mud at the “devotees” faction is a good example of the kind of crap comments commonly seen under these stories, contributing to flagging by non-devotees.
Oh yeah. "Indian government" is on my list of "Things HN is particularly tetchy about" that you're better off just not having an opinion of because you're going to get twenty points in the first 15 minutes and then the downvote squad will take you to -4 and flagged within two hours.
Not sure if the site allows, but would be much better to disable the comment section instead, so the news itself can stay.
Typical propaganda by a Modi hating, American owned and Soros funded rag. They can’t beat Modi at polls - so one day we have Jan 6 style Maidan Color revolution to overthrow Modi, next they try to get him lynched on Jan 5 in Punjab by blocking his motorcade for 20 minutes near the Pakistani border.
These so called reporters are inimical toward India, write incendiary lies and collaborate with Pakistan, Jihadis and Soros style ngos. So if you gonna dish it out you better take it too from the people as that is democracy. They indulge in worst kind of Twitter tricks using fake videos and fake news weekly.
We've banned this account for using HN for nationalistic and political flamewar.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.