Well, it’s been a tumultuous few days in the Indian news media—especially the digital, independent part of it. The Wire, a news website that is generally thought to be reliable, published a stunning article claiming that Meta, the parent company behind Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, had given Amit Malviya of the BJP— which is the current ruling party in India and overall a collection of bigoted pustules—sweeping powers to have any post taken down for frivolous reasons. Meta claimed it was all fake, The Wire published more articles claiming they had an email showing that Meta was lying, Meta said the email was fake, The Wire said it could prove the email was real, then their article proving it was found to be full of holes, people who they claimed had verified material for them came out saying they had done no such thing, and finally, The Wire pulled the stories and said they’d have an ‘internal investigation’ into their material, and possibly have it verified by independent researchers. And there was much drama on Twitter. Rightwing trolls spammed every post with exhortations to Meta to sue the wire; people who support The Wire initially giving them the benefit of the doubt, but after the second story, people started having their doubts, and by the time of the third story, everyone—except those still inclined to give the publication as much benefit of doubt as possible— was scrutinizing every part of the story and finding enough holes to turn the story into Swiss cheese. You can read all about it on the various articles that have flooded the internet. Try to stick to websites that are not rightwing garbage though.
How did this all begin?
Our story begins with a small Instagram page’s story getting taken down soon after it was posted, ostensibly because it had sexual content or nudity, which it did not. It showed a man worshiping a statue of Ajay Bisht, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. No nudity—unless, by nudity, Instagram’s algorithm meant the naked stupidity… never mind, the clever metaphor did not work. It seemed like a bad algorithm’s bad actions. Good story, but not something remarkable. The Wire even did one story with that angle.
However, after some weeks, it published a pretty remarkable story. It claimed that sourced in Meta had provided documentation showing that the post was taken down because the BJP’s abusive head troll had flagged it for removal. This was a remarkable claim, but not too outlandish, because, come on… it’s Facebook. They’re not exactly paragons of virtue. These guys have enabled genocide in Myanmar, even if only by omission. So is it really that difficult to believe that they were perfectly happy to kowtow to the BJP? Plus, The Wire had built up a not insignificant level of credibility through its various stories and reports. Unless you were a part of the rightwing gutter, you’re not likely to think they’d be fabricating things.
A quick aside: The Wire had earlier published a similarly big story claiming that the BJP had, with the help of certain IT companies, created an app that helped them automate their trolling and disinformation campaign to a large degree. That report was written by two not-reporters. One of those not-reporters was involved with this second story, as it would later emerge. End of aside
The denouement.
The Wire published story #3. This one contained two videos: in the first, they showed what was supposed to be a cryptographic verification of the stone email; in the second, their source allegedly showed the secret location where sensitive post-information review reports were stored. It also had screenshots of two emails from alleged tech experts who said that they agreed that the cryptographic verification was correct and checked out.
Almost as soon as the story was published, people who had started doubting the story, and people who had their knives out for The Wire in general, immediately started pointing out flaws in the report. For one, a video showing a script being run was not valid proof. It is trivially easy to have a custom script run instead of the one purportedly being run. The chief tech guy on the story for them asked how it could be if they installed the program on the video. Except, in *nix, because of $PATH precedence, whatever directory you put first is where the system will try to find a program. If you put a dummy program in a directory at the very start of $PATH, that’s the one that will get run.
But the real twist in the tale was when people pointed out that the date in the screenshot was wrong. It said “Friday, October 14, 2021“. The Wire, in what was a pretty shady move, silently replaced the screenshots with two showing the year as 2022, but, as people pointed out, it seemed to be a badly edited image. That’s just fabrication. It’s not a slip-up or an error. It’s lying.
Tech guy had some pretty fantastic explanations for the mismatch in year, but none of them were really plausible.
Meta, meanwhile, dropped their own bombshell. They claimed that the workplace.com instance shown in The Wire’s video was created using a free trial of the service. It was a spoof. So either The Wire got hoaxed, or The Wire was hoaxing.
More bombshells: People reached out to the independent researchers who had vetted The Wire’s verifications, and both of them said they had done no such thing! They also reached out to the page whose posts got taken down, who said that
- they had been a private page when the posts got taken down,
- the head troll did not follow them.
which meant the head troll did not really have any way of reporting them, unless Meta had given him really vast powers. Also, The Wire did not ask these questions to the page when they did this story.
The Wire pulled the stories, said they would do an internal investigation, and look to have the material verified by third-party sources. Instagram restored the posts that were taken down. The story is pretty dead. The Wire had a massive dent in its credibility.
Why am I writing about this?
I must say, The Wire has done some remarkably shady things that have come to light in the course of this saga. According to the most recent reports, Varadarajan, the editor-in-chief and one of the founders, claims that tech guy was the one who met the primary source and did the verifications and all. However, tech guy did not have a byline in the first or second story, which he really should have, given he seems to have done some work. Second, those screenshots were definitely fabricated. There’s no getting around that. Third, they seemed to have done almost no corroboration of anything their sources said, except post facto. That’s not great. My confidence in their reporting is greatly shaken.
What’s worse is that all the rightwing trash has been given a nice, heavy stick to beat everyone with. The Wire has queered the pitch for everyone trying to report on anything similar now. It’s going to be really easy for those dinguses to yell “Fake News” whenever something similar is reported. In fact, The Wire can probably no longer be quoted as reliable sources.
It’s still unknown if The Wire got taken in by someone or if someone at The Wire tried to spin a narrative to make an impact. If one wanted to be a conspiracies, then one could claim that this was a psyops done to destroy The Wire’s credibility. The Wire could still salvage their credibility by conducting a thorough investigation and releasing a full report. It does make it awkward to see them ask for donations though.
Also, dear lord, the number of sanctimonious pricks on twitter is insane! The number of thinkpieces about this is ludicrous. Although, I guess it highlights what a significant part of the discourse was occupied by The Wire. Its failings have really cast a shadow on the whole of independent media.
My flatmate and I obsessively followed the entire saga on twitter. It took up a significant part of our day. I think both of us started doubting the story with the second report, with the weird email. And from then on, each twitter thread pointing out flaws in the story just buttressed our misgivings. Both of us also think tech guy is pretty obnoxious.
Well, all that remains to be done is to see where this goes next. Meta is unlikely to sue The Wire. Rightwing trolls will beat The Wire over the head with this till the end of days. And the rest of us will wait for the report to come out.