Whitewashers of Islamist crimes, Alt News are back, this time to give a long rope to The Wire’s Founding Editor Siddharth Varadarajan and portray their columnist, Devesh Kumar, who is made the scapegoat in The Wire’s Meta saga as mentally unstable. After all, the elaborate profile of Devesh Kumar appears to be a ploy to prove him ‘mentally unstable’ as claimed in The Wire’s police complaint.
The Wire threw Devesh Kumar under the bus after it was forced to retract the Meta and Fog stories, claimed that Devesh Kumar had defrauded them by supplying fake evidence, and also alleged that he is mentally disturbed. Devesh, however, has denied the allegations of being ‘mentally unstable’. So Alt News swoops in like a knight in shining armour to help The Wire build a case for them.
Alt News profiles Devesh Kumar of The Wire-Meta fiasco
The elaborate article starts with how The Wire had filed a complaint against Devesh Kumar over allegations of fabricating documents and evidences wherein it was claimed that BJP’s Amit Malviya had incredible superpowers to get posts removed from platforms owned by Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram.
Alt New conveniently forgets to mention their own cofounder had happily retweeted multiple tweets of The Wire on Meta story in all excitement believing every piece of fiction that was written in it.
In fact, Zubair had very aggressively retweeted The Wire’s counter allegations when they ‘fact-checked’ Meta after the Facebook parent company first called out The Wire’s ‘evidence’ fabricated.
In fact, the flagbearers of ‘fact-checking’ never really bothered to fact-check The Wire’s claims on Meta controversy. Neither did they do so for their Tek Fog absurdity which also now stands withdrawn. Tek Fog absurdity which claimed BJP had super powers to hijack any platform, any social media account and ‘spread misinformation’ was also conjured up by The Wire in January 2022 and involved Devesh Kumar and one Ayushman Kaul, who was also involved in Meta ‘evidence’. In fact, Devesh and Kaul along with The Wire’s Naomi Barton had claimed how Alt News’ Zubair was ‘attacked’ online using Tek Fog, a super app which does not exist as evidenced later. The Wire had to withdraw all these stories, but Alt News did not bother fact-checking them.
After an elaborate profile where Alt News insinuates that Devesh Kumar could have been a pro at conjuring up imaginary and fantastical stories with zero substance in them they claim that it was Devesh who first approached The Wire with ‘evidence’ about Meta after they had published one basic report on Instagram user ‘cringearchivist’s private Instagram post was taken down. Often times, Instagram algorithm takes down pages or posts get taken down if they get mass reported. Sometimes after appealing, they even restore such pages or posts.
That Big Tech including Meta lack transparency is a given and there is no good reason to give them a clean chit. However, to use that point to conjure up fantastical stories to project the BJP, yet another enemy of the Left, as a biggest monster in the history of monsters without any proof is not just ‘editorial lapse’ but malicious move owing to confirmation bias.
Alt News claims that The Wire alleged Devesh reached out to The Wire after first report was published. In next report, which is referred to as first in four-part series of ‘investigation’, it was The Wire’s Jahnavi Sen who took byline. Sen, who wrote the technology has studied BA in Philosophy and has a Masters in ‘Development Studies’. Since then she has not worked in any technology related field. After Meta spokesperson said that the documents Jahnavi produced were fabricated, The Wire, instead of carrying out internal investigation, doubled down and in second report provided ‘proofs’ that Meta was lying. All these articles and claims were also retweeted and shared to a wider audience by Alt News cofounder Mohammed Zubair. This second report had Sen and their Founding Editor Siddharth Varadarajan’s bylines.
The Founding Editor, who took byline for technology related article making such enormous claims on Meta, which were amplified by Alt News itself, will later on claim he does not ‘understand’ technology much and then put all the blame squarely on Devesh Kumar and call him ‘mentally unstable’.
And even if he were ‘mentally unstable’ as Alt News’ extremely detailed profile on his other such seemingly false claims is no excuse for Varadarajan’s poor editorial call. He perhaps thought he’d win a Pulitzer for ‘taking on the Big Tech’ or get some appreciation from the fellow Modi haters who believe BJP is evil. Varadarajan knew he would get away with spreading lies, as he has earlier.
The Wire, instead of owning up that they goofed up or made a mistake or a judgement error or worst that they cooked it all up, they cried ‘attacked by all powerful BJP’ and seek more funds from gullible readers who like to live in their own echo chamber. This is also something Alt News does.
Alt News cofounder Mohammed Zubair, who dog whistled against BJP’s Nupur Sharma by sharing out of context video clip and accused her of ‘blasphemy’, never quite ‘fact-checked’ her. He did not tell what exactly Nupur was wrong about. She repeated what is written in Islamic scriptures. Zubair never pointed out what was the lie in Sharma’s comment. Zubair’s dogwhistling has led to riots and at least half a dozen murders.
This is what the mainstream media, especially activist journalism of left wing has been doing all these decades. They believe their own lies, not accept mistakes, steadfast with propaganda than truth. And even in face of mounting tech proof, they doubled down and brazened it out. Imagine what they would do with issues that are just about political or ideological narrative?
