WhiteHat Jr and its Desperate Actions to Censor Critics Crossed the Line
By: Samrat Dutta
Tags: Lawsuit, Censorship, Startup, Whitehat Jr, Edtech

You’re watching the IPL (Indian Premier League) peacefully and suddenly you see a bunch of men and women in formals fighting with each other. You came to know that they are fighting over an app. A kid named Chintu created an app and all of them wants to invest in that. Chintu learned coding from Whitehat Jr and your kid can do it too.

When I said “a kid”, I meant it. The character of Chintu is really a kid from 6th standard (around 11 years old). Yes, that’s an advertisement of WhiteHat Jr. That how aggressive their advertisements were before they were taken down recently. They are literally promising that they will teach kids (from age 6) coding and they will build their own apps and earn a ton of money. But that’s not all. They are desperately breaking all of the limits and abusing the copyright law to silence any criticism. They are keeping an eye on all major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and even 9GAG to take down any criticism towards their startup or advertisements or marketing policies [2].

What Happened?

Its founder Karan Bajaj filed a defamation lawsuit of 2 crore rupees against Pradeep Poonia, a YouTuber. What did he do? He criticised the company for its alleged misleading advertisements and cracked some jokes. WhiteHat Jr also claimed that Poonia hacked into their private Slack communication along with some other stuff.

What did Punia do?

Pradeep Poonia criticised their marketing strategy and usage of fake names like “Wolf Gupta” to market their products. He also showed some Slack conversations of WhiteHat Jr and cracked some jokes too.

Remember the advertisement I previously talked about? Ads like those are too misleading to be called an “advertisement”. Whitehar Jr violated the guidelines issued by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) by making dubious and unsubstantiated claims. The lawsuit against Punia says that ads were subsequently withdrawn “under legal advice” [1].

So, their aggressive TV ads were withdrawn. Then what was Punia criticising again? Guess what, WhiteHat Jr also used platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to spread misleading ads too.

“12-year Old Wolf Gupta learnt AI to get Rs 1.2 cr job from Google while other kids his age didn’t know what to do after school. Coding makes your kids entrepreneurs and scientists in the new world. World’s first 1:1 AI coding course for kids. Free Trial. Age 6–18 Only,” says one of their LinkedIn posts.

Also, similar posts were made on Facebook too.

See some of the screenshots of the ads on their LinkedIn handle are pasted below.

Advertisements of Whitehat Jr about Wolf Gupta and Ryan Venkat. [6]

Advertisements of Whitehat Jr about Wolf Gupta. [6]

So, is Wolf Gupta 9, 12, or 13? Looks like his age increases rapidly. Or maybe he is Ryan Venkat with a Fake ID. Also, is his salary at Google 1.2 crores or 20 crores? Or is it actually 150 crores?

2020 is really confusing.

The Battle

Poonia made several videos on WhiteHat Jr and exposed how they used an allegedly imaginary character along with the big names like Google to market their product.

Another lawsuit of Rs 14 crore ($1.9 million) was filed against Aniruddha Malpani (Angel Investor). Malpani’s several tweets are deemed as “derogatory imputations” in the lawsuit. [3]

Malpani’s one of the tweets can be found here.

In Another tweet, Malpani writes, [4]

“The systematic harassment by #WhiteHatJr to try to silence honest criticism against them continues ! They have now filed a case against me, suing me for Rs 14 crores ! Fortunately for me, truth is a strong defence against an allegation of defamation !”

He also attached a link to a copy of the lawsuit filed against him. You can find it here.

A snippet of the synopsis of the lawsuit. [6]

“There’s a narrative being played around that we are suppressing criticism, whereas, we are welcoming fact-based criticism and making amends wherever necessary as we did recently with our marketing campaign,” Bajaj told the Economic Times [4]. So, I hope he has no problem with this article as it is a fact-based criticism.

Poonia claimed that his video on Wolf Gupta has been taken down at least 3 times and was reported for copyright infringement. In the legal suit, WhiteHat Jr and Karan Bajaj have admitted that they sent takedown notices to social media platforms including YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit, “which were the platforms where the said posts were put up” [1]

Conclusion

WhiteHat Jr targets vulnerable parents who want to make their kids super smart from their very childhood. It claims that 6-year-olds will be able to code and make their own games and apps. It advertises fiction like facts. But most importantly, it silences voices. It silences any voice speaking against them or criticizing them. The one thing the internet doesn’t like is being silenced. And this time is indifferent. After WhiteHat Jr’s desperate attempts of silencing voices, codes from all over the world are making videos and writing articles criticising WhiteHat Jr. The internet amazed me with its capabilities and I hope it will keep doing it again and again.

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