A deep dive into what is really going on between The Wire and Meta

It all started when the news service had alleged that Meta gave some of its users, namely BJP's IT cell chief Amit Malviya, special privileges to take down any post from Instagram

News outlet The Wire on Sunday retracted a string of reports about social media giant Meta, and said that an investigation of its recent reports is still ongoing.

In its earlier reports, the news service had alleged that Meta gave some of its users, namely Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya, special privileges through its X-Check program to take down any post from social media platform Instagram.

This led to a back and forth between the news outlet and the social media giant. Meta has denied The Wire's  allegations, claiming all of them were fabricated, while The Wire has launched an internal investigation into its reporting.

What actually happened?

On October 6, The Wire said in a report that Instagram had taken down a satirical post poking fun at a man worshipping a statue of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for violating the platform's “nudity and sexual content” guidelines, even when the post did not contain any nudity. The story also pointed out that the post was removed within minutes of being uploaded, and wondered whether human intervention was responsible rather than AI.

This was followed by a report, based on a allegedly leaked internal document, on October 10 alleging that the post was taken down because it was flagged by Amit Malviya, Chief of Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT cell. The report claimed that Meta gave special privileges to Malviya through its X-Check program which allows any post reported by him to be removed.

Critics, however, pointed out that the X-Check program, unearthed by whistleblower Frances Haugen last year, did not grant the power to take down posts. Instead, it simply protected X-Check accounts from the Meta content takedown procedure that applies to ordinary users.  

Meta’s chief of communications, Andy Stone, took to Twitter on October 11 to quash the allegations, saying that The Wire’s report was fabricated.

“X-Check has nothing to do with the ability to report posts. The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans. And the underlying documentation appears to be fabricated,” said Stone in a tweet.

What was The Wire’s technical evidence?

The Wire defended its claims a day later by publishing an internal email sent by Stone, in which he admonished his colleagues about the leak and demanded that Jahnavi Sen and Siddharth Varadaran, the reporters who broke the story, be put on a “watchlist”.

Meta claimed that the email in question was also fabricated by The Wire. Other critics also added that the writing style used in the email did not match that of an American English speaker.

“The Wire cites a supposed email from Andy Stone. It is fake. The supposed email address from which it was sent isn’t even Stone’s current email address, and the “to” address isn’t one we use here either,” said Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen in a Twitter thread.

He also claimed that the supposed internal report used by The Wire in their first article “appears to be a fabrication” as the URL for it was not in use and so was the naming convention for the report.

Former Meta security chief Alex Stamos, who has criticised Meta since his departure, also questioned the authenticity of the document.

Rosen further denied the existence of a “watchlist”. However, a report by news outlet TechCrunch claimed that Facebook does in fact maintain a list of journalists.

“Facebook, like many other companies, does maintain dossiers on journalists. I know this because they accidently sent me the link to one about five years ago. Meta also does maintain email addresses with the fb.com domain,” wrote Manish Singh, a reporter for TechCrunch.

On October 15, The Wire stated that it had verified Stone’s email and had produced more technical evidence to substantiate its allegations. The news service claimed to have consulted two independent experts and also released a video. Many cyber security experts, however, were still sceptical.

Meta alleged that the video claiming to show an internal Instagram site with revealing information actually depicted a trial site created by an outside entity on October 13, after the news service’s initial reports on the social media giant.

The Wire also put forward screenshots of emails it said were from independent experts vouching for the authenticity of the original email. However, the emails showed incorrect dates from 2021, which was later attributed to a software error by the news service.

The last straw came when one of the experts who The Wire claimed to have consulted, Kanishk Karan, claimed that he never helped in the outlet’s reporting. He further said that he did not send any email.

How did The Wire respond?

Mounting speculation prompted The Wire to then launch an internal investigation into the matter.

“In the light of doubts and concerns from experts about some of this material, and about the verification processes we used — including messages to us by two experts denying making assessments of that process directly and indirectly attributed to them in our third story — we are undertaking an internal review of the materials at our disposal,” the outlet said in a statement, retracting all of its reports from “public view”.

Alex Stamos, among other experts, mentioned that there was a possibility that The Wire had an inside source in Meta who may have misled the news service using fake documents. Stamos believes that the outlet may have been duped before collaborating in covering it up, he revealed in a Washington Post report.

In a more recent statement, The Wire said that their internal investigation is still ongoing and that they are still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that they were deliberately misinformed or deceived. Lapses in editorial oversight were also being reviewed.

“Certain discrepancies have emerged in the material used. These include the inability of our investigators to authenticate both the email purportedly sent from a*****@fb.com as well as the email purportedly received from Ujjwal Kumar (an expert cited in the reporting as having endorsed one of the findings, but who has, in fact, categorically denied sending such an email). As a result, The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories,” The Wire said in a statement.

“Given the discrepancies that have come to our attention via our review so far, The Wire 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,” the statement added.