The heated fight between Social Media giant Meta and an Indian news website The Wire has been trending since last week. The controversy began when The Wire published an exclusive story where it claimed that BJP’s Amit Malviya got an XCheck credential and can take down any Instagram post. This was a big claim and the report got mixed reactions. Most people do not trust meta. So, The Wire’s report actually created a buzz and people started asking for an explanation from meta.
Before we talk about the controversy, let me explain a few things about the current Indian political scene. Right Now, Indian people are divided into two political segments. One is the people who support current PM Narendra Modi and Another one is the people who do not like Narendra Modi. If you look at social media posts, you can easily spot this divide. BJP also has an IT department that manages different social media activities and social campaigns of the party. This IT department is referred to as BJP IT Cell. The Wire is known for hating BJP and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The publication has published several fabricated stories to attack Modi and its party. People who support the Modi government hardly believe the publication. That’s why we are seeing mixed reactions to The Wire’s report.
Meta’s ‘XCheck’ or ‘Cross Check’ program was first exposed by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021 when the publication reported how Meta has built a system to exempt select users from the platform’s rules. These XCheck users could post anything on the platform and their posts won’t be moderated. People who are added to XCheck system are influential or popular people. These people could damage the reputation of the platform if they say anything negative about it.
On October 10, The Wire posted an article about the XCheck privilege of BJP’s IT Cell president Amit Malviya. The report also claimed how Instagram removed a satirical post claiming it violated the platform’s ‘nudity and sexual content’ guidelines. The post was a video with no visible sexual content. So, it was hard to understand how this post violated ‘nudity and sexual content’ guidelines.
The Wire further claimed that the post was taken down after it was reported by Instagram user @amitmalviya. This Instagram handle belongs to Amit Malviya who is serving as the President of the BJP IT Cell. The publication further claimed that it had accessed an internal Instagram report that makes it clear that Amit Malviya has xCheck privilege. If he reports a post on Instagram, it will be taken down immediately without any moderators looking at it. The publication also claimed that Malviya reported 705 posts on Instagram in the month of September and all the posts were taken down.
We knew about Meta’s Xcheck system but The Wire’s report extended the privilege to instantly take down any post just by reporting it. This was a bit surprising for me but I gave The Wire benefit of the doubt because trusting Meta was not an option.
The Wire’s claim was big, so Meta responded by saying the report was “inaccurate and misleading.” Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone confirmed that XCheck had “nothing to do with the ability to report posts”. He further claimed that the internal report accessed by The Wire “appears to be fabricated”.
To defend the initial article, The Wire published another article on October 11 with a screenshot of an email sent by Andy Stone to his internal team. In the email, Stone asked his internal team how the internal report “got leaked” and asked for more information on the issue. He also asked the team to add The Wire journalist Jahnavi Sen and editor Siddharth Varadarajan to a watch list.
Have a look at the language of the email. The wire claimed it was sent by Andy Stone, but it was certainly written by an Indian. Not just me, but several other people who initially beloved The Wire started having doubts about the publication.
There could only be two possibilities. Either the publication was posting fake stories to create controversies and get some publicity or someone was playing with them by giving them fake reports and screenshots.
The Wire, Meta’s chief information security officer Guy Rosen responded to the second report on Twitter. He tweeted that reports by The Wire were false. He confirmed that the email was fake and the email address in the photo is the one used by Stone.
Sophie Zhang, former Facebook employee, and whistleblower, also tweeted to call the Wire’s stories fake. She said that the stories as clearly based on fake documents.
Shoshana Wodinsky, a MarketWatch reporter, also called the screenshot fake.
Several former and current Meta employees tweeted in support of Meta. You can find several Twitter threads busing the lies of The Wire.
This was the point when everything turned against The Wire.
To support its second report and to answer who pointed fingers at the email ID in the screenshot, The Wire came up with another article in its support. In the third article, The Wire tried to add several pieces of evidence to prove the email id in question was actually read. The report also included a video explaining DKIM and the validity of Andy Stone’s email address in question.
This article backfired when people noted the dates in the screenshots added by The Wire to support its claims. See this Tweet and check the date.
These emails are timestamped in 2021. After several people pointed this out, The Wire edited the story and replaced the screenshots with the timestamps changed to 2022. Anyone can easily confirm that the newly added screenshots have been photoshopped.
The Wire also added a note in the article saying, “The screenshots of both experts, as first published, carried the date and time stamp of a computer that just been formatted with tailsOS and whose date had not been set correctly at the time of initial boot.”
But this was another big lie as pointed out by Pranesh Prakash.
In the same article, The Wire also posted a video of ‘instagram.workplace.com’ with a claim that it is accessible to a restricted group of staff members through a VPN. The wire claimed that the port stores post-incident reports involving VIPs.
Anyone who has used Facebook Workplace can easily spot the issue in this video. This was actually a demo workplace created on Meta’s Workplace by using the name “Instagram”. Several people pointed out ‘Core,’ the most basic subscription plan.
On October 16, Meta updated its original response to The Wire and Guy Rosen tweeted to clarify problems in new reports by TheWire.
Meta confirmed that the video was using a demo account set up with Instagram’s name and brand insignia. This demo account was running on a free trial and is not an internal account. This account was created on October 13 and has been locked for violation of Meta’s policies.
Now after The Wire’s fake screenshots and fake workplace setup have been exposed, very few people believe The Wire even if they don’t want to trust Meta.
The Wire does not want to extend this matter anymore. It tweeted by saying “We are not prepared to play this game any further.”
It seems the matter is over from The Wire’s end. The publication made a sensational claim without any genuine proof and posted a few pieces of evidence, including email screenshots and a workplace video. People found issues in screenshots and videos that forced us to believe how The Wire was faking evidence.
We don’t know who was right but The Wire managed to gain enough attention. Several fact-checkers who usually jumped into fact-checking media articles are quiet. The Wire will easily get away. Anyone can easily spot who is guilty by following all the incidents in the sequence. I have presented all the incidents in the same sequences as they happened. Read everything and use your interpretation to find out who is guilty.
