The Wire on Sunday published a post stating that they are taking down their Meta stories due to discrepancies and they will review the previous reporting done by their technical team. This was after the publication had announced last week that they would conduct an internal review and evaluate the sources and materials involved in the reporting.
The discrepancies that The Wire mentions in their recent blog include the inability to authenticate email sent from their source and from Ujjwal Kumar who was an expert they cited in their reporting. The Wire claims that there is a possibility that this was to deliberately misinform or deceive The Wire.
How did the to and fro begin?
For those not aware, The Wire had published a series of reports claiming that BJP IT cell head Ammit Malviya has the power to remove posts from Instagram. After Meta had denied the claim, The Wire published another article with screenshots of an email that was claimed to be from a Meta official Andy Stone proving that their allegations were true. These photos they added were sent to them by a source that they claimed were verified by two experts.
One of the experts that The Wire mentioned in their story was Ujjwal Kumar, an employee at Microsoft. The Wire shared a screenshot of an email by Kumar saying that he used the manual method and also corroborated that dkimpy uses the same algorithm. The email also says that it passed its DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail)-signature test.
Screenshot of email sent to The Wire by Ujjwal Kumar | Twitter
The Founding Editor of The Wire Siddharth Varadarajan had also shared on Twitter that Kumar had consented to the publication to share the email and his findings regarding the verification of the email by Meta.
However, soon after the publication of the story the publication claimed that Kumar wanted to back down from revealing his name in public. This was because Microsoft had denied being involved and stated that the mail was not sent by Kumar. This was not clarified by The wire but it came to light after other organisations like Newslaundary approached Microsoft and they issued a statement that he was not involved in this.
Kumar even went out on LinkedIn to state that he had requested them to correct the publication as the claims were factually inaccurate. In the same post he claimed that he had not conducted any verification or commented on the validity of any of The Wire's findings as claimed in the report. He also clarified that he had not sent the email that has been used by The Wire in their publication.
