'The Wire' forced to apologise & delete stories on Meta & BJP's Amit Malviya

Days after pulling out news articles making big claims against Meta's content moderation policies, digital portal 'The Wire' on Thursday issued an apology and said that it was subjected to "deception" by a member of its investigative team.

In the now-deleted articles, The Wire had claimed that BJP's Information and Technology chief Amit Malviya had certain special privileges to get posts removed from Instagram, which is owned by Meta.

In an official statement, Meta had said that the allegations made were false. It also said that emails from a Meta employee shared in the story to buttress it were also false. "We fundamentally reject these false allegations based on what we believe to be fabricated evidence," the tech firm had said.

Amit Malviya to sue 'The Wire'

The BJP leader said that he will file criminal and civil proceedings against the website. "Not only will I be setting the criminal process in motion but I will also sue them in a civil court seeking damages as they forged documents with a view to malign and tarnish my reputation," Malviya stated.

'Deception by a member of our Meta investigation team': The Wire issues apology

Issuing an apology, the website said that it is reviewing its internal editorial processes. "Had we done this before publication rather than after the fact, this would have ensured that the deception to which we were subjected by a member of our Meta investigation team was spotted in time," it said.

"The Editorial team takes moral responsibility for the omission and undertakes to ensure that in future all technical evidence will be verified by independent experts before publication," The Wire added.

Taking to Twitter, Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said The Wire's editorial team was fully aware of what they were "wading into".

"It's just they did not quite expect their bluff to be called in this manner. There is nothing 'moral' about this #FakeNews factory; there is nothing 'moral' about its contrived 'apology'," he said.        

The website has also removed three reports published in January about an application named 'Tek Fog', which it alleged was used by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to automate retweeting posts on Twitter, hijack inactive WhatsApp accounts and store data of citizens for targeted harassment.

"The shock-and-awe lies produced by @thewire_in are carefully designed with the evil intent to give a handle to anti-BJP disruptors in Parliament, anti-Modi orgs like @freedomhouse and feed the hate-India global activist lobby. The Wire is evil in intent, devious in content," Gupta said.

(Image: ANI/Shutterstock/Siddharth Varadarajan Facebook)