The Wire retracts investigative articles on Meta, Instagram

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.

Online news publication The Wire announced on its website that it would retract all recent investigative articles about social media giant Meta (previously known as Facebook) and Instagram (which the company owns) on Sunday.

The Wire had, on October 10, published an article where it accused Meta to give exclusive rights to the Bharatiya Janata Party IT cell president Amit Malviya to flout its privacy rules by taking down any posts bad for the political party.

However, Meta strongly denied the stories and called them baseless.

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Later The Wire put up a statement saying it will conduct an internal review and in the meantime, all articles related to the Meta’s XCheck programme will not be available to the public.

On Sunday, The Wire decided to retract all the articles related to the story. 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.

“Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time. However, certain discrepancies have emerged in the material used. These include the inability of our investigators to authenticate both the email purportedly sent from a*****@fb.com as well as the email purportedly received from Ujjwal Kumar (an expert cited in the reporting as having endorsed one of the findings, but who has, in fact, categorically denied sending such an email). As a result, The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories,” The Wire statement read.

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