Siddharth Varadarajan (The Wire) Andy Stone (Meta)
Online media publication The Wire on Tuesday night put out another statement stating it will set up an internal review of all documents and source materials used for its latest Instagram-Meta expose stories.
“Starting from October 6, 2022, The Wire published four reports on Meta, plus a statement on October 17. Our first report disclosed that Meta’s controversial XCheck program was operating in India and that BJP leaders were among those given this status – usually understood as safeguarding their posts from takedown complaints. The document we received also indicated that the role extended to taking down others’ posts – a claim Meta denied. In the second story, we published an email from a senior Meta official, Andy Stone, expressing anger at the leak of the document,” The Wire statement said.
The statement comes following doubts and concerns raised by various technical geeks and journalists regarding the integrity of the four articles published by The Wire against the social media giant Meta (previously known as Facebook). In its articles, the publication claimed that Instagram’s ‘XCheck’ program gave BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya discretionary powers to take down posts by reporting those.
The Wire has decided to make all concerned articles not available for public viewing following the latest development by two experts denying any involvement in their investigation story.
On October 10, The Wire published an investigation story against Meta claiming the latter gave exclusive rights to the Bharatiya Janata Party IT cell president Amit Malviya through its XCheck program. Using XCheck, Malviya allegedly has the right to flout Meta’s privacy policy by taking down any posts (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) which is bad press for the political party.
In response, Meta’s policy communications director Andy Stone termed the article as baseless and fabricated and XCheck had nothing to do with The Wire‘s article.
What followed was a war of words between Meta and the news publication. The Wire published a screenshot of an email from an angry Stone addressing his employees demanding the mole in the company.
As Meta continued denying any involvement, The Wire further published a detailed article on its investigative process where it mentioned DKIM verification of the emails.
Things became ugly as The Wire, on October 16 stated that the Gmail, Hotmail, and Dropbox accounts of one of its investigative journalists were hacked.
“One of The Wire’s principal researchers on Meta lost access to his Gmail+Twitter accounts and some others at noon today. Whoever hacked him is sending suspicious phishing-type messages, like the one below. Please don’t respond to messages from devesh1789@gmail.com or DMs,” The Wire‘s Founding Editor Siddharth Varadarajan tweeted.
Finally, The Wire released a statement on October 17, “We are not prepared to play this game any further,”
putting a full stop to the ongoing exchange of words with Meta.A Twitter account named @Kani5hk or Ka7an has accused The Wire of dragging his name in their investigative story.
Involved in making digital platforms safe for users, Kanish Karan tweeted he received an email from The Wire‘s employee Devesh Kumar (whose Twitter account has now been deleted) thanking Karan to help them in “sharing the DKIM verification demo.”
However, Karan has denied any involvement in the process. “I would like to confirm that I did NOT DO the DKIM verification for them,” Karan tweeted.
Karan further accuses The Wire of creating a fake email where his name was used.
“It caught me by surprise because I had not done so. I was thinking of it but did not do it eventually. Devesh, one of the reporters for the story, reached out for the review but I could not since I was on a vacation,” Karan tweeted.
Shaming The Wire, Karan said that he is disappointed by the news organisation as he had trust and faith in independent journalism.
The Wire said that it has taken all appreciation as well as criticism into account and has arrived at this decision.
“In the light of doubts and concerns from experts about some of this material, and about the verification processes we used – including messages to us by two experts denying making assessments of that process directly and indirectly attributed to them in our third story – we are undertaking an internal review of the materials at our disposal. This will include a review of all documents, source material and sources used for our stories on Meta. Based on our sources’ consent, we are also exploring the option of sharing original files with trusted and reputed domain experts as part of this process.
In this period, the reports in question will be withheld from public view. Based on our findings, we will determine a future course of action and inform our readers as well, and promise to act – as always – in their best interests,” the statement read.
This post was last modified on October 19, 2022 1:21 pm