Persistent Systems says internal investigation reveals no involvement in Tek Fog

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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Persistent Systems said its investigation into allegations about the IT company's involvement in Tek Fog, an app used for manipulating trends on social media, reveals no interaction with either the development of the app, or ShareChat's parent Mohalla Tech.

This comes a day after online publication, the Wire, published an article about how the ruling party BJP used the app Tek Fog to automate hate and manipulate trends on social media. The article said that two companies, Persistent Systems and ShareChat, were involved in the process.

Both the companies had denied the involvement in a statement to Moneycontrol.

Persistent Systems said that the company has investigated the allegations since the publication of the article. “Based on our investigation to date, we determined that Persistent Systems has had no interactions or conducted any business with Tek Fog, Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd or ShareChat.”

“At Persistent, we value inclusivity and free speech among our employees and society at large and have zero tolerance for hate speech and harassment. Our number one priority as experts in digital engineering is to provide best-in-class products, platforms, and services to our global clients while fostering a culture of inclusion and transparency,” the company said.

Mohalla Tech, the parent company of ShareChat, in a statement said, “We have noted a certain story in an online blog claiming links between Mohalla Tech and an alleged app and other entities. In absolutely no uncertain terms we would like to clarify and state that we are not aware of this alleged application and nor have we assisted (financially or otherwise) the group of persons related to this alleged app at any point.”

“The writers of this article have made claims that lack any evidence. We have sought this information in our response to them regarding these claims and have yet to receive any information,” the statement added.

What is Tek Fog and what are the allegations against the companies?

According to the Wire, Tek Fog is a “secret app” used by the ruling party's IT cell that can bypass the security features such as Captcha in social media platforms, to manipulate trends on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.

“Another important functionality present in the app screens was the ability for app operatives to delete or remap all existing accounts at a moment's notice. This feature theoretically allows them to destroy all incriminating evidence of their past activity,” according to the article.

The article further pointed out the involvement of Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech in the process.

According to the article, Persistent Systems was allegedly involved in the development of the app and cited screenshots of the internal document that indicates the app's active development.

“…technical documents that suggest the development of different layers of the app, including Twitter and WhatsApp integration, data input tools through Google forms, payment infrastructure via Paytm and automation tools using Tasker – an Android application that triggers specific actions like sending a message, based on inputted 'contexts' like user location, time, date, event and gesture,” the article read.

ShareChat, the article alleged, was used as a ground for testing and curating fake news, political propaganda, and hate speech, before they were used on other popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

The authors of the piece, the article said, verified these allegations using 14 Twitter and Facebook accounts, which had a linked ShareChat account. The Wire monitored the public posts made by these accounts on ShareChat and Twitter/Facebook between April 1 and April 30, and found that 90 percent of the posts between these platforms were common.

The posts were also analysed 3.8 million posts using IBM Watson tone analyser to detect their tone of the posts. “Out of the total 3.8 million posts reviewed via this method, almost 58% (2.2 million) of them could be labelled as 'hate speech'. This result was cross verified using Comprehend, another NLP tool provided by Amazon Web Services,” the report said.