On October 23, The Wire suspended its fake Tek Fog story from January 2022 that Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar authored. Now the URLs that hosted various reports of the story page of the story display a message that reads, “Update (October 23, 2022): This story has been removed from public view pending the outcome of an internal review by The Wire. More details here.” It was linked to the announcement The Wire made earlier on Sunday that it has permanently suspended the ‘Meta Vs The Wire’ stories as certain “discrepancies” emerged in the reporting.
In its statement, The Wire said it would also look into the older reports by the authors of Meta stories. At that time, it was unclear if Tek Fog stories would come under scanner in The Wire’s “internal investigation” or not. Now, with the removal of the reports, it is clear that The Wire is doubting its Tek Fog report as well. Notably, the opposition parties and activists raised the Tek Fog issue in the Parliament and the Courts, which has now been withdrawn by the portal.
In the story claiming to be the existence of a fictitious and mysterious app named ‘Tek Fog’, The Wire had claimed that it allows BJP to bypass all security measures available in top social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram 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. They claimed that the app can bypass email and OTP verifications required to log on to those platforms to create temporary accounts.
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.
In the story, The Wire admitted that they could not verify the claimed superpowers of the so-called app, and they didn’t see the actually app. They had based the entire story spanning into three reports based on screenshots, which could be easily fabricated. They had admitted that they could not verify whether the accounts mentioned in the story were created by the app or created manually using the normal process.
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 a thorough examination of their ‘evidence’. On the other hand, in Tek Fog they had slandered BJP and the Indian social media platform ShareChat, and perhaps for that reason, the story was live on its website for 10 months. ShareChat had urged The Wire to take down the Tek Fog story after the Meta story was exposed.
BJP, named as the main villain in both stories, has not made any official comments on the issue so far.
While the three main reports on the Tek Fog story have been suspended from the Wire website, one report containing a video discussion on the fictitious app is still there. Sophie Zhang, Billy Perrigo, Robert Baptiste, Tarunima Prabhakar, V. Anand and Sagarika Ghose joined with The Wire journalists for the discussion.
The Wire’s statement
Before removing the Tek Fog stories from public access, the ultra-leftist news portal earlier in the day permanently retracted the Meta 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 it now 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, including their investigators’ inability to authenticate both the email purportedly sent from Andy Stone of Meta and Ujjwal Kumar of Microsoft.
Meta Vs The Wire
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. Several experts stepped in and questioned the authenticity of the evidence provided by The Wire. Soon, The Wire said it would not continue with the story. Next, The Wire suspended the stories pending inquiry, and on Sunday, it formally retracted the stories.
