Days after making wild allegations against Meta and BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya, whom they attributed to having superpowers to control workings within Facebook’s parent company, propaganda outlet The Wire has now backed out and cried victim. In a statement released on Monday, The Wire claimed they are not ‘ready to play this game further’. The Wire also revealed how one of their reporters working on this story had a personal relationship with the Meta ‘insider’.
We are not prepared to play this game any further.https://t.co/0iB89mbylJ pic.twitter.com/Akh1ZHa5sh
— The Wire (@thewire_in) October 17, 2022
Interestingly, in the statement published on their website they have skipped the portion where it reveals that The Wire’s reporter has a personal relationship with Meta’s ‘source’ who ‘leaked’ documents. The archived version of the same statement which contained this revelation can be obtained here. They added a disclaimer that they edited the website version of their statement to clear relationships with their sources in Meta. Except, instead of clearing, they ended up removing the damning fact that one of their reporters had a personal relationship with the said Meta ‘insider’.
To put things in perspective, Meta has dismissed all allegations by The Wire and said that the ‘evidences’ provided were fabricated.
The Wire, in its statement, claimed that Meta’s responses, where it said that all the evidence The Wire gave to claim how BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya possesses some superpowers by virtue of being in an ‘elite list’ of users in ‘XCheck’, was fabricated were to goad them to give out more information about their source. This, when many tech experts, most of whom are actually Modi haters and dislike BJP to the core, have called out the shoddy reportage of The Wire. Even the images of so-called emails shared by The Wire were rejected by Meta as fabricated.
Meta categorically mentioned how the ‘workspace’ The Wire put up as evidence, was actually a spoof video made on a dummy/free trial version by someone and they are investigating it further. The Wire also claimed that Microsoft Asia’s employee Ujjwal Kumar, also helped them verify some mail as a legitimate email from Meta. Meta uses Microsoft email services and if an employee with Microsoft indeed indulged in this, it could likely tantamount to breach of client confidentiality, raising serious concerns about Microsoft’s privacy policy. OpIndia has written to Microsoft Asia regarding the concerns but we have not heard back from them yet.
The Wire has now claimed it will continue to work to independently verify Meta executive’s ’email’, which he has termed as fabricated. However, in all this, The Wire has not mentioned even once about their fantastical claims regarding Malviya’s superpowers to target any and every individual he wants at will in Meta. The trigger of this entire mess were the ridiculous claims conjured up by The Wire which even the BJP supporters found hard to believe. However, The Wire has chosen to stay silent on those claims.
