The Wire vs Meta saga has now reached bizarreness of epic proportions because now even their ‘independent experts’ who had ‘verified’ the evidence produced by The Wire have turned hostile and said they never sent the emails The Wire published as proofs to prove their entire story was not based on fabrication. The Wire had produced emails of two ‘independent experts’ who had allegedly ‘verified’ the DKIM signature.
Of these two ‘independent experts’, The Wire claimed one was Ujjwal Kumar, who is currently employed at Microsoft Asia and based out of Singapore. Facebook uses Microsoft email services and if Ujjwal Kumar indeed verified these emails for The Wire, it likely breached the client confidentiality by abusing his privilege. OpIndia has reached out to Microsoft Asia for their comment on the same, but have not heard back from them yet. We have sent a follow up email, and will update the article when we hear from them.
However, soon after the story was published and The Wire’s Founding Editor Siddharth Varadarajan boasted how a Microsoft employee, Ujjwal Kumar, too, had ‘verified’ their proofs, they claimed that Kumar no longer wants his name being made publicly available. Now, like a new twist in the tale, tech expert Pranesh Prakash has said that he reached out to both the ‘independent experts’ The Wire claimed to have consulted and both of them have denied having verified DKIM for The Wire.
I've just received confirmation from the 2nd independent expert (whose identity @svaradarajan shared with me) that he never sent the mail he's purported to have sent and that he never undertook any DKIM verification for them.
— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh) October 18, 2022
More updates soon.
And after Ujjwal Kumar of Microsoft got his name removed from The Wire’s so-called exposé, it appears the second independent researcher The Wire claimed to have consulted, has now said that they did not write the email The Wire showed as proof for their fantastical story through which they tried to show a Meta-BJP nexus. Pranesh tweeted that he has just received confirmation from the 2nd independent expert, whose identity Varadarajan shared with him in private, never sent the email The Wire published. He also said that he never took the DKIM verification for The Wire.
This punches multiple holes in the Meta vs The Wire saga which most people had not believed from the word go. Things appeared much more dubious after The Wire revealed that one of their ‘sources’ in Meta whom they likely relied on for ‘leaked documents’ had a personal relationship with one of their reporters.
Further, it was The Wire that raised the bogey that BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya was the all-powerful individual with super privileges to get any and every random post on social media platforms removed. The Wire had claimed that Malviya had super privileges and was part of an elite list of users at Meta and hence he personally got 7 posts of an obscure private account on Instagram with under 500 followers at that time, removed. All this insanity was triggered because a non-entity on Instagram running a troll account had his posts removed by algorithm. However, The Wire claimed it was not AI but Malviya behind it and provided ‘evidences’ which Meta has said were fabricated.
To prove those ‘evidences’ were not fabricated, The Wire roped in ‘independent experts’, one of whom no longer wants to be associated with the story and got his references removed while other just said they never sent any mails The Wire gave as evidence.
If an OTT series is not made on this absurdity to show how The Wire got taken for a ride, our team here would be really disappointed.
