Fake news! Wire-Meta row shakes Indian media

One of India’s leading independent news voices, The Wire, is learning a hard truth about journalism: sometimes you break the news, sometimes the news might just break you.

Indian journalism has been pulled back and forth by the Wire-Meta blow-up. Here’s the latest twist: The Wire suspended its reports on Meta’s controversial XCheck program late last night after new doubts were raised about the authenticity of the documents it was relying on.

Tech giant Meta will be taking the win. It’s been asserting since The Wire’s first October 6 article that the documents used were fabricated. These documents seemed to support the claim that XCheck privileges in India went beyond what had been previously thought. (Crikey wrote about the back and forth on Monday.)

The story started with reports that Instagram posts from the anonymous satirical site @cringearchivist poking fun at leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had been blocked, flagged for sexual activity/nudity, although the posts had neither.

The Wire followed up this month with the claim that the BJP’s IT cell was able to use XCheck privileges to have material from critical pages on Meta’s platforms taken down without review. Part social media wing, part troll farm, the IT cell uses activists around the country to spread contentious posts, particularly through closed WhatsApp groups.

Meta cried “fake news” saying the documents The Wire relied on were fabricated. Meta head of security Guy Rosen tweeted XCheck was “built to prevent potential over-enforcement mistakes. It has nothing to do with the ability to report posts, as alleged in the article.”

In its “Facebook Files” report exposing XCheck last year, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz wrote that XCheck “shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process”.

He wrote: “Some users are ‘whitelisted’ — rendered immune from enforcement actions — while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.”

The Wire doubled down with a new story about a purported email from Meta’s communications head Andy Stone. Meta said this document, too, was fabricated. The Wire conducted an interim review. Meta said that this also relied on fake documents.

And then it got worse. Fellow digital news start-up Newslaundry reported that two people credited with the review said: “Not us.” Ouch!

Want all the gory tech details? You’ll find it in this to-and-fro in the Platformer newsletter.

The Wire stood by its reporting — until late yesterday. Now, it says, it is withholding the stories from public view, saying: “In the light of doubts and concerns from experts about some of this material, and about the verification processes we used — including messages to us by two experts denying making assessments of that process directly and indirectly attributed to them in our third story — we are undertaking an internal review of the materials at our disposal.

“This will include a review of all documents, source material and sources used for our stories on Meta.”

This won’t be the first time that Indian journalists have been fitted up with fake documents. Last year, prominent female journalists were conned with offers of jobs at Harvard. One, embarrassingly, resigned from her television presenter job and announced she was moving to America.

The Wire matters in the India media ecosystem. Along with start-ups like Newslaundry, Scroll.in and The News Minute, it’s been a key voice in transforming Indian media, challenging the Hindu populism of the Modi government, dragging a more cautious traditional media along behind it.

The Wire says it’s answerable to its audience, relying on member commitment and reader donations. It will be hoping that a transparent reporting of itself will keep this audience onside in this damaging moment. Supporters of an independent Indian media will be hoping so too.

It matters, too, that the media — including the US tech media — focus on the fake news ecosystem in India and the role of social media platforms in spreading it. Alex Stamos from the Stanford Internet Observatory (and former chief security officer at Facebook) was an early critic of The Wire‘s claims, but as he tweeted at the weekend: “If The Wire is wrong, then this does not disprove the overall concern over the relationship between the BJP and Meta. I have long said that the biggest organizational weakness at Meta is the unification of platform policy and government relations.”

In the meantime, @cringearchivist tweeted yesterday: “@meta has silently restored the … post”.