After nearly three weeks of escalating rhetoric, The Wire is retracting its reporting on Meta. On Sunday, the nonprofit publication said it had discovered “certain discrepancies” with the material that had informed its reporting on the social media giant since October 6th. “The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories,” the outlet said, pointing to the fact it could not authenticate two emails that were critical to its previous coverage of Meta. One of the emails The Wire said it could not verify includes a message the outlet had attributed to Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.
“Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time,” The Wire said. “We are still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that it was deliberately sought to misinform or deceive The Wire.”
Before Sunday’s retraction, The Wire claimed Meta gave Amit Malviya, an information technology official with India’s ruling BJP party, the power to remove posts from Instagram, an assertation Meta has consistently disputed. Rather than backing down after the company shared a comprehensive rebuttal on October 12th, The Wire kept publishing stories that claimed Meta was misleading the public, culminating in an October 15th article that featured a screen recording the outlet claimed showed proof of the original takedown request that kicked off the entire saga. One day later, Meta said an internal investigation found the video showed a Workspace account created on October 13th, suggesting someone made the account to back up The Wire’s reporting.
Meta did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. Amid all the back and forth, Instagram eventually reinstated the post that prompted The Wire’s investigation in the first place.
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