Whistle in the Dark

What the Wire-Meta saga means for the future of tech-reporting

- NIKITA SAXENA AND SOPHIE ZHANG

On 10 October 2022, the news website The Wire published a story alleging that Amit Malviya, the national convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Party's IT department, had special privileges under Meta's Cross-Check, or XCheck system through which the organisation reviews content decisions on high-profile users that allowed him to get Instagram posts removed, regardless of whether they violated the platform's guidelines. (Meta is the recently changed name of the social media company previously known as Facebook. It is the parent company for brands such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.) The XCheck system had previously been reported on, but was not known to include such sweeping powers earlier. The Wire's first story included screenshots of an alleged internal Instagram report, which the publication claimed to have accessed through a source within the organisation. Andy Stone, a policy communications director at Meta, alleged that the supporting evidence in The Wire's story "appears to be fabricated."

The Wire published two follow-up reports, meant to bolster the credibility of their claim. The first of these contained screenshots of an alleged email from Stone to his colleagues, in which he questioned how The Wire had gotten access to documentation regarding Malviya's account on Instagram. Once Meta and other independent experts began raising doubts regarding the veracity of this email, The Wire published its third story, claiming that it had conducted a technical test to authenticate Stone's email, and that this test had been verified by two independent experts. Yet, both of these reports were also riddled with inconsistencies. For instance, the two experts The Wire had ostensibly reached out to for its third story denied having verified the material.