The Indian news outlet known as The Wire has backed down from a story associated with the social media networks owned by Meta Platforms after acknowledging that its team was not able to authenticate the information that led to the initial arguments.
Earlier this month, The Wire published a story where the company headed by Mark Zuckerberg was accused of giving high-profile politicians privileged access to its flagship social media platforms to remove certain kinds of content.
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The controversy started with the removal of an Instagram post from user @cringearchivist that contained a satirical image of Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of the Uttar Pradesh region.
According to the Instagram user, the content was flagged and removed as it reportedly violated the platform’s policies on sexual activity and nudity despite not depicting that kind of imagery.
What Did The Wire Article Claimed?
The Wire story alleged that politicians had access to a special program known as XCheck that allowed celebrities and public figures that gave these people special privileges such as flagging and removing content that they did not like.
Amit Malviya, the head of the IT cell for the country’s ruling party – Bharatiya Janata Party – was reportedly the person who removed the content by using his privileges, The Wire stated in its report.
Even though XCheck does exist and Meta Platforms (META) has acknowledged how controversial the program is, the company asserted that politicians in India did not have access to it and that it was not used in the case cited by The Wire.
In the report, The Wire shared images that depicted the XCheck interface and the report from Malviya’s Instagram account of the post published by @cringearchivist.
However, Meta refuted these allegations by stating that its cross-check program does not allow users to eliminate content from the platform automatically. In addition, the parent company of Facebook commented that the picture was fabricated by data from the firm’s internal workplace system.
“While it is legitimate for us to be held accountable for our content decisions, the allegations made by The Wire are false. They contain mischaracterizations of how our enforcement processes work, and rely on what we believe to be fabricated evidence in their reporting”, Meta stated in a blog post published 6 days after the report was published.
Despite doubling down on the story’s accuracy many times, The Wire was eventually forced to recant its initial allegations after an expert who allegedly verified the authenticity of an e-mail sent by Andy Stone, Facebook’s Policy Communications Director, that was considered evidence of the news outlets’ claims, denied his involvement in the verification process.
The Wire Retracts and Conducts Internal Investigation to Find Out What Happened
After days of back and forth between the two parties, The Wire finally published a statement where it stated that it is conducting an internal review amid its coverage of Meta in this series of stories.
The Indian news outlet is now questioning the veracity of the materials used to back up the claims made in the article and has identified “certain discrepancies” in the evidence it used such as its inability to authenticate the e-mails and images the article referred to.
The Wire implied that the entire situation could have been an effort to mislead the editors and journalists to make unsubstantiated accusations against Meta. The editorial team’s inability to appropriately double-check the sources used for the article is also being scrutinized.
“Given the discrepancies that have come to our attention via our review so far, The Wire will also conduct a thorough review of previous reporting done by the technical team involved in our Meta coverage, and remove the stories from public view till that process is complete”, the statement reads.
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