The Wire-Meta debate looks to be a story of blatant fabrication, deceit, and falsehoods that are then betrayed. The biggest absurdity, though, is that it originates from a website that calls itself one of India’s leading defenders of press freedom. Thewire.in has long portrayed itself as some sort of heroic champion for media freedom, despite being criticised in the past for its less than truthful reporting.
Although there have been a few examples in the past, the present sequence of events is typical of the dishonesty of a platform that believes it is above the law despite the fact that the majority of its pieces have a predictable political tack. In a nutshell, the wire reported a few weeks ago that Amit Malviya, the head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) IT Cell, had been given privileged access to Facebook’s internal ‘crosscheck’ system, which allowed him to remove any posts that his party did not agree with. They gave two memes that were removed from Instagram soon after they were uploaded as examples.
If thewire.in had double-checked its reports, the scandalous story may have stopped there. Instead, they bragged about additional follow-ups and assertions of supporting documentation for their accusation. They effectively used an email from Meta executive Andy Stone as their ‘proof’. However, Stone quickly clarified that he had never authored the alleged email and that the URL didn’t seem to belong to Meta. The ‘experts’ mentioned in the article afterwards came forward to deny doing the verification in question.
Less well-known reports of Muslims starving at the Pakistani border and a lack of life-saving medications in Kashmir were categorically refuted by the parties involved. The Wire later ‘withdrew’ the articles, but not before waxing lyrical about its ‘standards’ of reporting. The Delhi Police is looking into the criminal and civil lawsuits that Amit Malviya has filed against the portal.
Devesh Kumar, a member of The Wire’s management, has been charged with providing them with fake emails and other deceptive information. Even in the written complaint, the portal alluded to Kumar as being ‘mentally unstable’. To summarise, the bosses of thewire.in published articles without confirming the veracity of the inputs, lost their cool when confronted, created and falsified electronic proof to support their claims, and blamed a coworker in order to escape responsibility for their actions.
The editors disregarded every rule of the workplace, such as verifying facts before writing and staying by your colleagues during a crisis. Thewire.in secretly removed its most recent news from the Tek Fog app while the debate about the Meta pieces was in full swing. According to these reports, the BJP was using this software to create trends and promote them against its rivals. However, the US government-funded think tank ‘The Freedom House’ has used such reports to degrade our democracy from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’.
The Wire has taken down their reporting, but ‘The Freedom House’ has not provided any clarification or withdrawn its incorrect analysis. Friends of Thewire.in who are members of our journalist organisation continue to believe that the portal is associated with media freedom and that as a result, such ‘minor difficulties’ should be disregarded.
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