A day after BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malviya said that he will initiate criminal and civil proceedings against The Wire for their fake XCheck Meta story targeting him and BJP, Malviya has said that he will now lodge an FIR against the leftist propaganda portal. In a statement issued today on Twitter, Malviya said that he will lodge the FIR against Wire and its management and reporters at the concerned police station.
Amit Malviya said that he will file the FIR under sections that deal with forgery, forgery for the purposes of cheating, forgery to harm reputation, defamation, cheating and criminal conspiracy, among others. Apart from this, he will also initiate civil proceedings for damage caused to him by The Wire and its associates.
Media read out on The Wire… pic.twitter.com/aETSkJZIpe
— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) October 28, 2022
Opening up about the issue for the first time after Wire published the stories alleging that he was given a special privilege by Meta to take down content on Instagram and post content without any moderation, Malviya said that it is clear that The Wire and some unknown persons entered into a criminal conspiracy with the intent to malign and tarnish his reputation.
He said that The Wire deliberately inserted his name into the story about Instagram taking down an image minutes after it was uploaded due to an algorithm falsely flagging the image for nudity, and then fabricated evidence to implicate him. It is notable that the account where the image was private, had very few followers, and was not followed by Malviya. The operators of the account themselves had blamed faulty AI on Instagram for taking down the image, and the initial Wire report had reported exactly that.
But in a follow-up report, The Wire claimed that it was taken down by Amit Malviya, claiming that he has been given ‘XCheck’ special privileges by Instagram owner Meta to take down content, and post any content he wants. After Meta had denied the claims made in the story, Wire produced the screenshot of a purported email from Meta official Andy Stone to his team that seemed to show that the allegations were true.
But Andy Stone denied writing that email and said it was fake. Even before Stone had issued the denial, social media users had pointed out evidence in the screenshot that proved that it was fake, including language not typically used by Americans. After that, Wire produced more screenshots from two independent experts, including a Microsoft official, which claimed that they have verified the email of Stone to be true.
But the entire story fell apart after both experts denied that they had verified the email, and said that screenshots of their emails published by Wire were fake. After this, The Wire was forced to retract the stories and announced a review of the episode. The portal also took down its earlier stories on Tek Fog, where they had made similar claims of BJP having an app with superpowers to manipulate social media platforms.
Wire has also issued an apology to its readers, but is yet to apologise to Meta, Malviya and others who were dragged into their fake story. Amit Malviya said, “even while retracting the story, The Wire refrained from apologising to me, despite maligning and tarnishing my reputation and causing serious harm to my professional career.” He said that his role requires him to vociferously advocate the BJP’s point of view on national issues, across platforms. This role is based on trust and camaraderie, between him and his interlocutors across platforms and more importantly with the public, he said.
“However, The Wire’s stories have vitiated the atmosphere and severely dented relationships and trust built over the years for me to carry out the functions of my responsibility,” Malviya added.
Talking about the entire episode, Malviya said, “This also undermines the democratic and informed choices that the public makes, through a carefully calibrated campaign of disinformation and calumny, and does irreparable harm to the democratic right of dissent.”
He said that given this backdrop, he is left with no option other than to seek appropriate legal remedies against The Wire’ and its management/ reporters.
