Indian news outlet The Wire said on Tuesday it is setting up an internal review to assess the documents, information, source material and people it relied on for critical stories on Meta that claimed the social juggernaut gave governing party BJP’s top digital operative an unchecked ability to remove content from Instagram and a series of follow-up pieces in which it said Meta executives were misleading people.
The statement on Tuesday follows one of the security researchers that the Wire portended to rely on – and supposedly cited an email by him to confirm the authenticity of a Meta executive’s email – saying a fake email was used to suggest he had participated. The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan told local news outlet Newslaundry earlier Tuesday that the publication was suspending stories on the American giant until the review is done.
Devesh Kumar, one of the tech reporters of the Wire stories, deactivated his Twitter account earlier Tuesday amid mounting criticism.
The Wire reported earlier this month that Facebook had given governing party BJP’s top digital operative an unchecked ability to remove content from the platform. The report, which relies on what it claims are internal documents, appeared to advance WSJ’s reporting of an internal company program called XCheck, where Facebook shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process.
Meta’s comms Andy Stone insisted that the XCheck program “has nothing to do with the ability to report posts” and publicly called the documents “fabricated.” The Wire then published what it claimed was an email Stone wrote to his colleagues, questioning how the documents that the Wire cited leaked. Facebook doubled down on its rebuttal, saying the purported email from Stone was also fabricated.
The Wire last week then moved to verify the authenticity of the email with the help of independent security researchers but its conclusion was met with wide skepticism from security researchers. Today, one of the two security researchers cited by Wire, too, said that he did not participate in the verification.
(More to follow)
