After Editors’ Guild Of India, Bloomberg Retracts Commentary On Wire’s Unverified Tek Fog Claims

US-based news and analysis publication Bloomberg has retracted a commentary that it published in January, based on The Wire’s report on Tek Fog.

About the Tek Fog report

In January, heavily Left-leaning news and commentary portal The Wire published a report claiming that the Bharatiya Janata Party was using an app named 'Tek Fog' to manipulate social media trends and send automated abuses to certain journalists and commentators. 

The portal claimed that the app was led by BJP leader Devang Dave, who denied all allegations in an email to the portal. Dave’s response in January can be read in his tweets here.

Last week, following the embarrassment on its Meta-Amit Malviya link stories that were called out as fake news, the portal retracted its Meta stories and quietly withheld its report on Tek Fog from public view.

What Bloomberg column on Tek Fog said

When the Tek Fog story published in January, it attracted strong reactions from the Left-liberal section of the media, anti-BJP commentators and opposition leaders. They ignored valid criticism and loopholes in the stories to target the government.

Bloomberg too joined the bandwagon. On 13 January, it published a column headlined ‘India’s Tek Fog Shrouds an Escalating Political War’. The sub-heading said, “Technology is being used against the people, and those in the world’s largest democracy are the latest victims.”

The column began by saying:

“For much of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nearly eight years in power, the relationship between social media platforms, journalists and India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been nasty and vitriolic, and almost always murky. Now we can start to understand why.

“A browser-based application was reportedly used by the BJP to infiltrate social media platforms in order to spread misinformation, target female reporters and home in on anyone it deems an opponent.”

Bloomberg retracted column on 1 November

The link to the column now says, “Bloomberg retracts column on Tek Fog’. The original column can be read on Archive.org here. 

It was written by Tim Culpan and Andy Mukherjee.

Bloomberg follows Editors’ Guild in retraction

Last week, the Editors Guild of India retracted 'references to The Wire's Tek Fog stories' in its press release issued in January where it demanded Supreme Court intervention regarding Tek Fog. The retraction happened a day after Swarajya reached out to the Guild for a comment on The Wire’s retraction.

“The Editors Guild of India had issued a statement on January 11, 2022 expressing deep concern about the online harassment and targetting of women journalists. Amongst other instances, the statement had also referred to a series of reports carried by the Wire on an app called the Tek Fog. Since the Wire has removed those stories as part of their internal review following serious questions on the veracity of their reporting, the Guild withdraws the references made to all those reports,” the verified Twitter account of the Guild posted.