Indian news website, The Wire, on Thursday, issued a statement apologising to its readers and promising better editorial checks days after it took down its damning report on Meta's controversial XCheck programme.
"The Wire acknowledges that the internal editorial processes which preceded publication of these stories did not meet the standards that The Wire sets for itself and its readers expect from it. To have rushed to publish a story we believed was reliable without having the associated technical evidence vetted independently is a failure of which we cannot permit repetition," the statement published on The Wire's website said.
The Wire retracted its report last week that had alleged that Bharatiya Janata Party's social media head Amit Malviya was part of the elite XCheck programme that whitelists high-profile users and protects them from the company's usual enforcement rules. The investigation by The Wire had claimed that Malviya's XCheck privileges were not just limited to protection from reports against his profile, but also allowed him to report and remove any post without a review from the company.
This prompted Meta to vehemently deny the story and led to back and forth between the social media giant and The Wire, each trying to prove the other wrong. However, The Wire was forced to take down the initial reports and the rebuttals after independent tech reporters and analysts found holes in the editorial process.
In Thursday's statement, The Wire said that while the process of review was on, it had learnt from the incident that all verification processes that involved technical skill, needed to be cross-checked by independent and reputed experts in the field. "Had we done this before publication rather than after the fact, this would have ensured that the deception to which we were subjected by a member of our Meta investigation team was spotted in time," the statement said.
The Wire said that the person responsible for the investigation into Meta's XCheck programme was "no longer working with The Wire in any capacity". While the story was written by Jahnavi Sen, The Wire said it was reporter Devesh Kumar who was the only person in the team to have met Meta's internal sources, and the person in-charge of verifying all the documents.
The news website said that there would not be a repeat of such an incident and that it was putting in place "robust processes" for cross-checking documents and information obtained from sources.
"This combination of not fully grasping the complexities of technology and a slippage in editorial assessment of tech-related matter resulted in the publication of stories which did not eventually hold up. For this we owe an apology to our readers," The Wire said.
The Wire, amid criticism from other journalists and push back from Meta, removed all the articles related to the matter from public view. Last week in an interview with the Platformer, editor Siddharth Varadarajan had said, "In our own initial review, we recognized there were some inconsistencies. The fact that this expert that one of our researchers said he spoke to for the video verification of the DKIM test has now said publicly he wasn't part of this process made us decide that look, we need to review what happened."
The Wire report had claimed that the XCheck privileges given to BJP's Malviya by Meta provided him with a "gift of free hand" - the ability to take down whichever post he wanted, without any further review by Meta.
However, Andy Stone, the policy communications director of Meta, had pushed back saying, "X-check has nothing to do with the ability to report posts. The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans. And the underlying documentation appears to be fabricated."