TDP’s ‘cash for tweet’ cover up boomerangs

[hyperbole]

Hyderabad: Telugu Desam Party is at it again. The Andhra Pradesh’s ruling party has now roped in Twitter Bots obviously for a price, for its malicious social media campaign, to hit out at the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the Telangana government for registering a case into the alleged data breach by IT Grids company which provides IT services to TDP. Several social media campaigners were also roped in, obviously for a price, to lead the misinformation campaign and bail out TDP from the crisis by trying to garner support from the digital citizens.

The TDP appears to have planned this misinformation campaign being termed by netizens as ‘Cash for Tweet’ scam, to blame the Telangana government, evidently to cover up its lapses in the alleged data breach scam. It all started when a whistleblower T Lokeshwar Reddy, a native of Andhra Pradesh and resident of Hyderabad, lodged a complaint with the Cyberabad police over alleged data theft committed by IT Grids, a company which provides IT services to TDP, through an app called ‘SevaMitra’.

The company, which designed the app Sevamitra, had accessed the personal information including Aadhaar details of 3.7 crore citizens of Andhra Pradesh, to help TDP tap potential voters in its favour. But when the alleged data breach came to light, the TDP leadership including party president and Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his son and IT Minister Nara Lokesh attempted to pass on the blame to the Telangana government to escape people’s wrath, hiring social media campaigners.

On Monday, the ‘cash for tweet’ campaign was launched with attempts to provide traction to hashtag #TSGovtStealsData. A closer scrutiny of the handles posting and reposting the TDP favoured tweets showed that the hashtag was being tweeted by random people, who were neither from Andhra Pradesh nor have any connection with the State. A close examination of their locations reveals that a large number of the handles belonged to people from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and various other north Indian States. Surprisingly, the non-Telugu twitterati were able to understand fake Telugu newspaper clippings and tweeted in English, Hindi and Telugu languages on their handles.

Sources said a private company was hired to post tweets with the hashtag #TSGovtStealsData. The firm has used its multiple accounts to tweet using the same hashtag. Handles on the names of Ria (supposedly a reporter from Mumbai), Santhosh Shukla (an actor from Mumbai) and Bollywood Chowk (an organisation from Gurugram) have tweeted in support of Chandrababu Naidu. Interestingly, these were all Twitter verified handles and posted the same message in their tweets. At least 30-35 such handles could be seen posting same messages within a few hours on Monday.

Further close examination of the handles revealed how fake they were. For instance, Ria (Twitter handle @RiaRevealed) tweeted that “Good to see steel industry booming in AP again. TRS Data Steal #TSGovtStealsData” (sic), revealing it as a fake. Otherwise who else would tweet about ‘Booming Steel Industry’ when talking about ‘Data Steal’. The handle used photograph of a female model and profile description was copied from the biodata of a Bollywood actress Andria Dsouza published on the web.

Another handle Manu (@Manu23_ns) hailing from New Delhi, posted tweets in Portugese language educating its followers on how to retweet a tweet to make many followers. Interestingly, the same handle posted an image of Telugu newspaper clippings, blaming TRS. The ‘multi-language’ expert misspelt the word ‘fraud’ as ‘froud’ in its tweet – “Here is lots of froud in politics (sic).” Her tweet was retweeted by another fake account of @Charmi_Kaur, a random Punjabi name from Panipat who understood Telugu and retweeted it.

The TDP campaigners appear to have hired paid Twitteratti to spread the false propaganda. One such Twitter campaigner Sonam Gupta (@100nam_Gupta and @100nam__Gupta) had multiple accounts separated by an extra ‘_’. While one handle claimed that she hails from Pune, other handle termed herself a resident of Delhi NCR. Most of these accounts can be found endorsing and promoting the same tweets of different products, political parties and events.
“These handles are owned by people who tweet for money. Chandrababu and Lokesh, in order to cover up their mistake, committed another mistake of paying money for tweets to show Telangana government in poor light.