On October 10, Indian news website The Wire came out with a damning report on Meta's controversial XCheck programme, which whitelists high-profile users and protects them from the company's usual enforcement rules.
The report stated, citing internal sources and documents, that Bharatiya Janata Party's social media head Amit Malviya is in this elite XCheck (pronounced cross check) list, and that his XCheck privileges were not just limited to protection from reports against his profile, but also allowed him to report and remove any post without further review from the company.
Meta representatives vehemently denied this claim, drawing follow-up reports by The Wire to back their initial story, leading to further rebuttals by Meta, and counter-rebuttals by The Wire.
With several aspects of their reporting being marred in doubts, and brought into question by third party tech reporters and analysts, The Wire is now currently investigating its reporting process on this entire story.
All the articles published around this story have now been removed from public view, pending this review, and another past investigative report by The Wire has now been brought under question.
The publication's founding editor Siddharth Varadrajan, in an interview to Platformer, said that The Wire's lead technical researcher Devesh Kumar was the only person in the team to have met Meta's internal sources, and the person in-charge of verifying all the documents.
While questions on Kumar's credibility have now been raised, Varadrajan claimed equal responsibility for the entire investigation, stating that he was "hands on involved in the story".
Where It All Started: The Questionable Takedown Of An Insta Post On Yogi Adityanath
On October 6, 2022, The Wire reported that Meta-owned Instagram had taken down a satirical post by handle 'cringearchivist' - which posts social and political satire-related content.
The post in question mocked a video showing a resident of Ayodhya praying to an idol of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
The questions arose when the user claimed, according to The Wire report, that according to Instagram's notification it was taken down for violating the platforms 'sexuality and nudity' restrictions.
However, there was no nudity or sex-related content in the post.
Enter The Malviya-XCheck Claim
Just four days after The Wire reported on the unusual takedown of cringearchivist's post, it published another story titled, "If BJP's Amit Malviya Reports Your Post, Instagram Will Take it Down – No Questions Asked."
This report, written by Wire reporter Jahnavi Sen - who had also written the previous report on the takedown of the Instagram post, made the damning suggestion that XCheck privileges given to Malviya by Meta provided him a "gift of free hand" - the ability to take down whichever post he wanted, without any further review by Meta.
XCheck or "cross check" first came under public knowledge last year when the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the story with a detailed investigation based on company documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
According to WSJ, the XCheck exempted a whitelisted set of high-profile individuals from the usual company regulations - rendering them immune from enforcement actions. However, there was no mention of sweeping powers to take down posts without review, as reported by The Wire last week.
The Wire claimed to have accessed an internal report from Instagram, revealing that no human intervention was required for the take down of cringearchivist's post, the reason being that the reporting user - Malviya - had XCheck privileges.
The report also claimed, citing internal sources, that Malviya had reported 705 posts on Instagram in September, all of which had allegedly been taken down.
Meta's Rebuttal And An Allegedly Leaked Email
The report was instantly refuted by Meta, which stated to the media that the report was "inaccurate and misleading".
Meta's communication head Andy Stone took to Twitter to state that XCheck privileges did not entail the ability to report posts. "The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans," he said, while alleging that the documentation provided in The Wire's report appeared to be fabricated.
The Wire doubled down and defended its story by putting out a follow-up to its previous report, which contained a screenshot of an email allegedly written by Stone and sent internally, where he seemed to acknowledge the veracity of the Instagram takedown report published in the previous article, while questioning how it had been leaked.
Meta refuted The Wire's follow-up scoop, with Guy Rosen, the company's chief information security officer, stating that the 'leaked email' provided by them was also fabricated.
The Wire's Documentations Under Scrutiny
As the week unraveled a bitter spat between The Wire and Meta, several tech experts and social media users chimed in with their views on the topic. The documentation provided by The Wire, in particular, came under scrutiny, with several red flags being raised around it.
Red flags have been raised around both the documents provided by The Wire - the leaked Instagram takedown report, and the leaked email, allegedly sent by Stone.
Rosen stated that the url "instagram.workspace.com" seen in the initial document by The Wire is not in use anymore.
He also stated that the email, allegedly from Stone, would have the domain name @meta.com, instead of @fb.com, owing to the change of name of the parent company from Facebook to Meta last year.
Others scrutinising the email also pointed out several red flags, which suggested the screenshot could have been fabricated.
These included the use of the old @fb.com domain name, the spelling error in The Wire's founding editor Siddharth Varadrajan's name (it states Varadaran), a non-aligned like symbol, and language unlikely to be used by a public relations executive.
The Email Verification Gone Wrong
Facing serious charges of publishing fabricated documents, The Wire doubled down further to defend the authenticity of the screenshot of the email provided in the second story, and provide rebuttals to the scrutiny of the second story.
This third scoop on the matter, titled "Meta Said Damaging Internal Email is 'Fake', URL 'Not in Use', Here's Evidence They're Wrong", relied on a screen recording from their internal source at Meta to show that the instagram.workspace.com URL did exist, but only to those who had access. The article states that it requested the source to use a timer to ensure that the recording was authentic, while also claiming to have reviewed the video's metadata.
Devesh Kumar, who reports for The Wire, claimed to have taken several steps to prove the authenticity of the email, allegedly sent by Stone.
He emailed Stone, and Rajiv Aggarwal who heads Public Policy at Meta India to their emails with domain @fb.com, while activating read receipts, to show that they were receiving emails, and that the emails were not bouncing.
Kumar then claimed to have verified the authenticity of the email by verifying the DKIM signature. DKIM stands for Domain Keys Identified Mail - an email authentication technique that lets recipients of emails to verify that an incoming email has been authorised by the domain from which it had been sent.
Kumar claims to have used a Python-based open-source tool called dkimpy to authenticate that the DKIM signature in Stone's email was valid.
The article included a video to show the entire DKIM signature verification process used by Kumar. However, it was questioned by tech analyst Alex Stamos, who claimed that the entire process could be faked.
The article further mentions that Kumar had demonstrated the whole method to two independent researchers, while including emails from them confirming the authenticity and replicability of the DKIM signature verification process followed by Kumar. While their names were redacted from the email, their job descriptions were added - one was a lead architect at Microsoft, and another was described as an independent security researcher.
The Microsoft employee, who was identified by The Wire, told Newslaundry that he did not participate in the verification process.
Independent law and policy researcher Pranesh Prakash, who co-founded Center for Internet and Society, and has been a vocal critic of the verification process of the email provided by The Wire, was made aware of the identities of the independent researchers who were claimed to have aided in the verification process.
Prakash had reached out to one of the researchers - Kanishk Karan - who denied being part of the process entire, and claimed that the email shown by The Wire article as part of the verification process did not belong to him.
The other independent researcher had also recanted his testimony on the matter, claimed Prakash.
Following this, The Wire set up an internal investigation of its articles on the matter, and has removed them from public viewing pending the investigation.
Past Investigation Under Question
Following the red flags in The Wire's investigative processes in the story, a past investigation on the controversial Tek Fog app - which was allegedly used by the Bharatiya Janata Party to spread hatred and political propaganda, has been brought under question.
The investigation was also led by Kumar, who continues to defend the articles on the Meta-XCheck topic.
Indian social media app ShareChat, who had been linked to Tek Fog by The Wire's past investigation, has now requested the news outlet to remove all the past articles on Tek Fog mentioning their app.