Delhi Police files FIR against The Wire on complaint by Amit Malviya

New Delhi, Oct 29: BJP's IT department head Amit Malviya on Saturday filed an FIR with the Delhi Police for forgery, cheating, harming reputation, defamation, criminal conspiracy against news website The Wire and its senior editors over their now withdrawn Meta reports.

Malviya had accused news portal 'The Wire' and some unknown persons of entering into a "criminal conspiracy" to tarnish his reputation.

The complaint has been filed with the Special Commissioner of Police, Crime at Police Headquarters in Delhi against 'The Wire' founder Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor Sidharth Bhatia, editor MK Venu, deputy editor and executive news producer Jahnavi Sen, Foundation for Independent Journalism and other unknown persons for the offence punishable under 420, 468, 469, 471, 500 г/w 120B and 34 of the Indian Penal Code. "This is not the first time the accused has published fake news," he told the special commissioner of Delhi Police (Crime).

Malviya spoke to media a day after issuing a statement that he will pursue criminal and civil proceedings against the portal over stories, since retracted, that insinuated the BJP leader enjoyed the privilege on Meta platforms of having any post taken down which he believed was against the BJP's interests.

Though 'The Wire' has apologised to readers and withdrawn the stories as questions, including from experts, mounted over their veracity, the BJP leader noted that it has refrained from apologising to him despite "maligning and tarnishing my reputation and causing serious harm to my professional career".

Malviya said the Wire's reports alleged the Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) regularly colludes with members of the BJP in removing content deemed unfavourable to the party. The stories claimed that he was allowed to post any content on Instagram without any of its filtration algorithms kicking in.

"The report went on to cite alleged internal correspondence of Meta to justify its claims, alleging I had used said privileges to take down a total of 705 posts to date," he said.

Malviya said even after Meta issued a categorical denial and said the documents shown by the portal were "fabricated" and that the 'Xcheck' status, the privilege reportedly bestowed on him, had been mischaracterised, the Wire instead of pausing its coverage and doing an internal audit went on to publish yet another "malicious" report. "It is clear that The Wire and some unknown persons entered into a criminal conspiracy with intent to malign and tarnish my reputation, deliberately inserted my name into a story, and fabricated evidence to implicate me," he said Malviya added, "This also undermines the democratic and informed choices that the public makes, through a carefully calibrated campaign of disinformation and calumny, and does irreparable harm to the democratic right of dissent."

The news portal had also apologised to its readers for slippage in its editorial assessment. "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," it said. The Wire had added, "In the life of any publication, an occasion may come when it is misinformed.

The moral test is whether the publication persists or speaks the truth. We chose the latter when we realised we had been given fraudulent information."

The Editors Guild of India on Friday also criticised the portal's handling of the stories. It said it was "disturbed" by the recent turn of events with respect to reports published by news portal 'The Wire' on Meta and urged newsrooms to "resist the temptation of moving fast on sensitive stories".