Days after The Wire withheld its series of reports claiming that BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya had some superpowers to remove posts from Meta-owned Instagram, the ultra-leftist news portal has now permanently retracted the stories. The Wire was forced to withhold the stories and had decided to do an ‘internal review’ after the reports were found to be completely fake, based on fabricated evidence.
The formal retraction of the story by The Wire means now it admits that it has no evidence to prove the outlandish and bizarre claims made by it, and therefore admits that the entire story was fake.
The Wire says that its ‘investigation’ is still ongoing, and they have found that they are unable to conclusively confirm the authenticity and bona fide of the sources used by their ‘reporting team’. They say that certain discrepancies have emerged in the material used, which includes the inability of their investigators to authenticate both the email purportedly sent from Andy Stone of Meta and Ujjwal Kumar of Microsoft.
The Wire had carried multiple reports on the story based on these ‘emails’, the first email from the Meta official purportedly proved that the Wire story about Amit Malviya having superpowers on Instagram is true, and the Microsoft official’s email purportedly confirmed that the first email was authentic. But both Andy Stone and Ujjwal Kumar denied writing the emails, and said they were fabricated.
Now The Wire is saying that as both these persons have categorically denied such emails, it believes that it is appropriate to retract the stories. The portal states that are “still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that it was deliberately sought to misinform or deceive The Wire.”
The Wire had also used another email from another security expert to claim that he had authenticated the Meta email, and later that person Kanishk Karan had also clarified that he didn’t send such emails and it was fabricated. But the Wire does not mention the name of Kanishk Karan.
“Lapses in editorial oversight are also being reviewed, as are editorial roles, so that failsafe protocols are put in place ensuring the accuracy of all source-based reporting,” The Wire added.
It interesting that The Wire is now blaming its ‘reporting team’ for the fake story, when the fact is that its founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan was named as co-author in some of the stories. This makes the editor the part of the ‘reporting team’.
In another significant development, The Wire also said it “will also conduct a thorough review of previous reporting done by the technical team involved in our Meta coverage, and remove the stories from public view till that process is complete.” While they have not named which other stories done by the same team will be under review, another story with similar bizarre and outlandish claims about BJP’s ability to manipulate social media was the Tek Fog story published earlier this year.
Devesh Kumar was the primary ‘tech expert’ that worked on both the stories, and both the stories had similar claims and similar loopholes. The Wire had claimed that the mysterious app named ‘Tek Fog’ allows BJP to bypass all security measures available in top social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc, and could create and delete dozens of accounts at the click of a button. They claimed BJP could hijack social media trends and target hatred towards journalists using the app.
Similar to the Meta story, netizens had exposed the massive loopholes in the Tek Fog story too. That story also entirely relied on ‘screenshots’ of the so-called app, and didn’t have any other verifiable evidence. And again, like the Meta story, the Tek Fog story was also questioned by tech experts who are not supporters of BJP.
While The Wire claimed that it will also remove the stories authored by the same reporting team from public view till the process of review of those previous stories are completed, the Tek Fog stories are still available on its website till the time of writing this report.
Given that it has been thoroughly proved that the Meta story was completely fabricated, The Wire should take down the Tek Fog story, and any other story where Devesh Kumar and others from Meta story were involved, as soon as possible.
It is notable that while The Wire spread similar lies in both Meta and Tek Fog stories, they were slandering a global giant like Meta and dragged in another giant Microsoft, which resulted in thorough examination of their ‘evidence’. On the other hand, in Tek Fog they had slandered BJP and Indian social media platform ShareChat, and perhaps for that reason, the story is still live on its website.
ShareChat has already urged The Wire to take down the Tek Fog story after the Meta story was exposed.
BJP, named as main villain in both the stories, has not made any official comments on the issue so far.
