Months after The Wire released a controversial article, claiming that ShareChat’s parent company Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd is involved with Tek Fog and both were engaged in sharing news favorable to the BJP, ShareChat has released a statement asking the media house to take down the previously disputed articles.
On October 18, ShareChat released a statement against The Wire and asked them to take down an article written by one Dinesh Kumar as well as other related reports. This comes days after Meta and The Wire were engaged in controversy after The Wire, in an article, alleged that Instagram posts were deleted whenever BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya reported any.
ShareChat said that the public had raised concerns regarding the authenticity of the materials and investigation used in such reports and the verification practices followed by organizations like The Wire.
Earlier this year, The Wire had published an article claiming that the application Tek Fog used ShareChat, to share hate speech.
The article published in January claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party used an app called ‘Tek Fog’ to artificially inflate the party’s popularity, manipulate public perception and harass BJP critics.
These claims were made based on tweets by Aarthi Sharma, who claims to be an ex-employee of the BJP IT cell.
The article further claimed that Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. (ShareChat’s parent company) were working for the BJP IT cell and used ShareChat to curate and spread fake news, hate speech and political propaganda before sending it to other popular social media platforms. ShareChat had vigorously denied the allegations.
ShareChat’s recently released statement reiterates “ShareChat has never engaged with any person or company/organisation that is associated with or working on the mysterious “Tek Fog” application that has been conjured up by The Wire.”
The desi social media platform stated “we would like to remind The Wire that the very same researchers had published an article earlier this year. The claims made against us were published without seeking our comment, quoted an expert who we understand has sought to distance himself from The Wire in the latest story and alleged collusion without a shred of evidence.”
“We urge The Wire to take down this previous report by Mr Devesh Kumar and others from public consumption, especially given that our severe reservations about the motivations and practices followed by Mr Kumar and others are now shared by many across the world and The Wire team as well.”, the statement read.
ShareChat is an Indian social media and social networking service, developed by Bangalore based Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan.
ShareChat has over 400 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The company’s application offers features that include private messaging, tagging and a personal messaging feature, enabling users to share videos, jokes, songs and other language based social content with other unknown users. The current valuation of the company is $5 billion.
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