BJP youth leader, Tek Fog app targeted Zubair

NT Correspondent
New Delhi

The arrest of Mohammed Zubair, journalist and cofounder of fact-checking website AltNews, is the culmination of a years-long campaign by a network of anonymous and inauthentic accounts linked to Vikash Ahir, Gujarat state president of the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) and co-convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the youth wing of BJP, according to an investigative story published by The Wire on Saturday.

Zubair was arrested on June 27 under section 153A (giving provocation with intent to cause riot) and 295A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) of the Indian Penal Code.

He was arrested following a complaint tweet by an anonymous account going by the handle @balajikijaiin, which flagged a 2018 tweet by Zubair that included a photograph of a hotel sign board on which the word ‘honeymoon’ – written in Hindi – had been changed to Hanuman.

The complainant, who said the photo hurt his religious sentiments, may or may not have known that it was a screenshot of a scene from a four decade-old film, ‘Kissi Se Na Kehna’, made in 1983. 757 accounts linked to Ahir The Wire claims that it has uncovered a network of 757 accounts linked to Ahir that have attempted to incriminate Zubair alongside Pratik Sinha, the co-founder at AltNews.

These accounts, the report claims, highlights and misconstrues old tweets uploaded by the two journalists to portray them as “Hinduphobic”. They even tag the local authorities urging them to arrest the journalists for supposedly hurting religious sentiments. This network included eight replica accounts of @balajikijaiin, the anonymous account whose complaint formed the basis of Zubair’s arrest by the Delhi police, the report claims.

Complementing this activity was a larger network of 18,364 accounts which were also used to trend other hashtags – #ArrestZubair, #Arrest- MohamedZubair and #ArrestBlasphemerMdZubair – that targeted the journalist.

Logically, a tech company that aims to combat the harms associated with mis-and-disinformation, too collaborated with The Wire’s investigation. Analysis of three hashtags between June 1 and June 30, 2022 found they went on to ‘trend’ after being promoted by right-wing ideologues and politicians associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with large followings on the platform. It is found that around 62% (11,380 accounts) of this larger network that sought to manipulate public perception around the arrest were also part of the original Tek Fog network, a sophisticated app used by online operatives to hijack major social media and encrypted messaging platforms.