The Wire’s report against Bharatiya Janata Party’s Amit Malviya claimed he has superpowers at Meta, using which he can get any Instagram post removed. The report, however, has now been thoroughly debunked as fake and fabricated. The Wire’s tendency to peddle fake news has been out in the open for a long time but as their real face got exposed literally to the whole world in the Meta issue, there have been efforts by many to pass it off as an one-off, minor error.
Since the beginning of the fight between Meta and The Wire, there have been speculations and allegations that The Wire fabricated the evidence to paint a bad picture of Meta and the BJP. However, The Wire was not alone, and its friends came to the rescue.
Even after The Wire retracted the reports and initiated an “internal investigation,” these friends believed that The Wire was a victim of a well-organized scam. A scam that would give the Nidhi fiasco a run for its money. A scam is so elaborate that the tech experts got their best tools out to examine whatever evidence they got hands-on and give their opinion. Sometimes I wonder if Nidhi was feeling bad for not getting this much attention after it was revealed she was scammed. But anyway, let’s come back to those who are still standing with The Wire.
Meghnad, a left-leaning researcher, quoted the statement by The Wire and expressed that he felt the news portal was ‘duped and scammed’ by ‘sources.’ He wrote, “The Wire has taken down the recent flurry of Meta stories after doubling down on it for days. There are only two possibilities here: a) Wire deliberately & maliciously did these fake stories to malign Meta & BJP. b) They were duped & scammed by ‘sources.’ I think it’s b.”
However, it is notable that Meghnad did call for the release of all the “evidence” The Wire collected while reporting the claims that BJP’s Malviya has superpowers.
Karan Saini, one of the researchers who called out The Wire’s founder and editor-in-chief Siddharth Varadarajan for his “lies” on social media, also sided with The Wire towards the end. He attempted to put the blame on the chaat-lover Devesh Kumar in one of his tweets for misleading The Wire. He wrote, “The picture appears to show Devesh Kumar having misled folks at The Wire, not limited only to the story about his accounts allegedly being hacked, but also more maliciously throughout the course of the investigation/publication process.”
Former Meta’s employee and currently Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google Rahul Fernandes openly came in support of Siddharth Varadarajan. He wrote, “If you’ve followed his work over the years, you’ll know Siddharth Varadarajan is a man of serious intellect. The interview with The Platformer shows you he’s also willing to take the blame and not choose the easy route of throwing someone else under the bus.”
He added, “It’s not as easy time to be associated with The Wire. This is just a little note to say how much I trust you and appreciate the work you’ve done over the years. You’ve been among the handful few who’ve kept journalism alive in India.”
Rahul Gandhi fan Sanjukta Basu also sided with The Wire. She said, “I didn’t doubt for a minute. It’s crazy to think Wire which is already the target of the govt, and all kinds of defamation suits will just slip like that. Besides, it’s Meta, of course, we can’t trust them. Occam’s razor.”
Many others said that they were feeling sad over what happened but restrained from taking sides. The likes of Barkha Dutt, however, decided to see the “larger picture” and said, “In the Meta, Vs. Wire spat, journalists took sides basis their politics & not facts. The Chamcha-Morcha face-off is dismaying. And western media’s blind celebration of Indian activists over journalists muddies waters.” She took the opportunity to promote “a new platform.” Convenient, we must say.
The Meta fiasco was not a one-off, not a mere error by The Wire. As we have documented over the years, the far Left portal has been peddling fake news and fake allegations habitually. They have sold lies on multiple occasions and with explicit editorial sanction. What has changed this time around is that they poked a tech giant and got burned in return.
