Bharatiya Janata Party social media cell chief Amit Malviya on Friday said that he will file a police complaint accusing The Wire of forgery, cheating, defamation and criminal conspiracy for publishing an article claiming that he holds special privileges that allowed him to get posts on social media website Instagram removed instantly.
On Sunday, The Wire retracted the article, published on October 10, and a series of other reports it had published about Meta, the parent company of Instagram. On Thursday, the news website apologised for publishing the articles and claimed that it had been deceived by a member of its investigative team.
Hours after the apology, Malviya had said on Thursday that he would initiate civil and criminal cases against the news website. In a social media post on Friday evening, the BJP leader alleged that The Wire had deliberately involved his name and fabricated evidence in its article.
“It is clear that The Wire and some unknown persons entered into a criminal conspiracy with the intent to malign and tarnish my reputation…” Malviya alleged in his statement.
In his statement, Malviya added that The Wire did not apologise to him even after retracting its story.
He alleged that the article had harmed his professional career, which 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 me and my interlocutors across platforms and more importantly with the public,” Malviya said. “However, The Wire’s stories have vitiated the atmosphere and severely dented relations and trust built over the years for me to carry out the functions of my responsibility.”
On Thursday, The Wire had responded to Malviya’s statement about taking legal action, saying that a publication could be misinformed on certain occasions.
The Wire had stressed that it spoke the truth after realising that it had been given fraudulent information by its source. The news website added that whether the source who gave the the material for the article acted on his own or someone else’s behest will be subjected to the judicial process.
‘The Wire’ vs Meta row
The controversy started after on October 6, The Wire said that Instagram had deleted a satirical post showing a man worshipping a statue of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath for violating the platform’s guidelines on “nudity and sexual content” even though the image did not depict any nudity.
The publication followed this up with a report on October 10 claiming that the post was taken down after a complaint by Malviya, the head of the BJP’s social media cell. The Wire report claimed that Malviya has special privileges through an Instagram programme called X-Check that ensures that any posts he reports are removed from the platform immediately, with “no questions asked”, even if they do not violate Meta’s rules.
On October 11, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, said that The Wire’s report was based on false information. He said that X-Check system had “nothing to do with the ability to report posts”.
He also said that “posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans” and that an internal report of Instagram cited by The Wire’s source “appears to be fabricated”.
Defending its report, The Wire published another article on October 11, with an image of an email allegedly sent by Stone on October 11 in which he rebuked some of his colleagues, asking them how the internal Instagram report “got leaked” and seeking more information on the matter.
The report also claimed that Stone had asked his colleagues to put Varadarajan and The Wire journalist Jahnavi Sen on a “watchlist”.
Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen claimed that the email, too, was fake.
After this, The Wire on October 15 said it had verified Stone’s email and produced more technical evidence to support its claims. But this was met with scepticism from technical experts.
The news website had also published an explanation of the technical process that it had followed while writing the articles, which cited redacted emails from two cybersecurity experts. However, both the experts later denied having been part of the process.
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