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Indian Political App Tek Fog Allegedly Hijacked Trends and Manipulated Public Opinion on Other Social Media Platforms

3 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 5 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Persistent Systems and deployed by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha allegedly harmed X (Twitter) users, Women and girls and 10 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
Occurred
Coverage
3 reportsJan 2022

What happened

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.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (3)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends
    thewire.in · Ayushman Kaul, Devesh Kumar
  2. Right-wing Indians have their own app to manipulate WhatsApp and Twitter
    qz.com · Samanth Subramanian
  3. India’s Tek Fog Shrouds an Escalating Political War
    bloomberg.com · Tim Culpan, Andy Mukherjee

Who was involved

Alleged developer
Persistent Systems
Alleged harmed party
X (Twitter) users Women and girls Women WhatsApp users Social media users National security and intelligence stakeholders Journalists Journalistic integrity Indian women journalists Indian voters Indian social media users Epistemic integrity

AI systems implicated

X (Twitter)WhatsAppTek FogSocial media platforms

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
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Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.1.

  • Political manipulation

    "Political manipulation - Use or misuse of personal data to target individuals’ interests, personalities and vulnerabilities with tailored political messages via micro-advertising or deepfakes/synthetic media."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Coercion/manipulation

    "Coercion/manipulation - Use of a technology system to covertly alter user beliefs and behaviour using nudging, dark patterns and/or other opaque techniques, resulting in potential erosion of privacy, addiction, anxiety/...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Political and Economic

    "Political and Economic - Manipulation of political beliefs, damage to political institutions and the effective delivery of government services."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Electoral interference

    "Electoral interference - Generation of false or misleading information that can interrupt or mislead voters and/or undermine trust in electoral processes."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Political

    "In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum1 . In future, there are concerns that oppressive governments could use AI to shape citizens’ opinions"

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Biased influence through citizen screening and tailored propaganda

    "AI-powered chatbots tailor their communication approach to influence individual users' decisions. In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum. In future, there...

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Surveillance and Censorship

    "Content moderation has emerged as one of the key use-cases of LLMs (Weng et al., 2023), indicating the potential of LLMs for surveillance and censorship as well (Edwards, 2023). Surveillance and censorship are one of th...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Disinformation and manipulation of public opinion

    "AI, particularly general- purpose AI, can be maliciously used for disinformation (351), which for the purpose of this report refers to false information that was generated or spread with the deliberate intent to mislead...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #210 on the AI Incident Database · all 3 reports