After a search operation by the Delhi police at The Wire’s founding editors Siddharth Varadarajan and M K Venu, one of the publication’s offices at Delhi’s Bhagat Singh Market was also searched.
The Wire in a statement said, “Although full cooperation was done by our side, the Delhi police crime branch took away the hard disks used by the publication’s accountants, without mentioning any hash value or providing a cloned copy so that the normal financial work could continue uninterrupted.”
Based on a complaint by the Bharatiya Janata Party IT cell president Amit Malviya of cheating and forgery against the organisation, the Delhi police conducted search operations in the homes of editors of the news website.
Electronic devices of Siddharth Varadarajan and M K Venu were also examined during the search, however, neither of them has been arrested or detained.
“I am filing the complaint for the offences of cheating, forgery for the purpose of cheating, forgery for the purpose of harming reputation, using forged document or electronic record as genuine, and defamation, among other provisions of IPC (‘The Wire’, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, MK Venu and Jahnavi Sen shall be collectively termed as ‘Accused’),” Malviya stated in his complaint.
Background
On October 10, The Wire’s published a story blaming social media giant Meta (previously known as Facebook) for giving exclusive rights to Malviya in its XCheck programme.
The XCheck programme allows its members to flout Meta’s privacy rules by trashing any posts that are against them. In short, reduce bad press.
It soon blew out into a war of words between Meta and The Wire, with the former blaming the latter for its‘ baseless reporting.’
However, things went left for The Wire announced on its website that it would retract all recent investigative articles about Meta. Accepting the possibility of lapses in reporting and editorial oversight, it said it will continue to review the previous reporting done by the technical team.
The Wire publication which earlier retracted stories it published against Metas content moderation policies, has further said that it was subjected to “deception” by one of the members of its “Meta investigation team”. In an update posted on its website, the publication said it was currently reviewing its internal editorial processes.
“Had we done this before publication rather than after the fact, this would have ensured that the deception to which we were subjected by a member of our Meta investigation team was spotted in time,” The Wire said.
