Publication defends Instagram exposure of BJP

The fight between social media giant Meta (Facebook) and Indian online news publication The Wire escalated when the latter defended its article which questioned Metas’ secretive XCheck program published last week.

Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, accused The Wire of publishing baseless and fabricated stories about the XCheck program. The online media house claimed that Instagram had granted discretionary privileges to BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya to remove posts (among other things).

In its latest response to Meta’s allegations, The Wire said that prior to publishing the leaked email conversation by Meta’s director of political communications, Andy Stone, one of its reporters emailed test through Superhuman, which lets the sender know when the email was opened by the recipient.

The reporter received a notification that the test email had been opened by the recipient, in this case Andy Stone, The Wire said. The news house said sources at Meta have leaked information that Stone uses an email ID @meta.com for external communications and his @fb.com for internal communications, to track any leaks and determine whether the leak was within the organization or outside.

The Wire further stated that it uses an open-source Python-based tool called dkimpy (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to verify the authenticity of its email. This is to determine if an email is from the sender using a specific domain or if the attachment body of the email has been tampered with in any way.

The Wire used dkimpy to verify whether Stone’s email was real or not, and it was. He added that before investigating the whole episode, he contacted a reliable source who had worked in Meta for years.

“After Stone reacted to our story about Malviya’s XCheck privileges on Twitter by saying that the document we quoted “appears to be fabricated”, we reached out to a source we trust and know to be a Meta employee. This individual – whose identity and position we know and whom some of us have also met in person – is the one who shared Stone’s email with us expressing his dismay at the leak of the instagram doc Thread had published. The source also shared the email message file, including the header source, email metadata, and full message with Threadsaid the online news publication.

Commenting on the ongoing war between Meta and The Wire, Hyderabad-based data activist Srinivas Kodali tweeted about the security research. He said: “I know every cybersecurity researcher wants to weigh in on the meta-education thread reports on how to do security research. Beyond DKIM verification, internal portal videos, they verified their sources with payslips and there were multiple sources. Demand more from Facebook.

Background to The Wire’s Meta article

On October 10, The Wire exposed Meta’s XCheck program where it accused the social media giant of giving Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) IT cell chairman Amit Malviya exclusive right to flout privacy rules. of the company by removing any message that is bad press for the national political party.

In his defense, Meta fiercely denied such claims and criticized The Wire for publishing two articles which, according to Meta (formerly Facebook) Chief Information Security Officer, Guy Rosen, were “strange and riddled with falsehoods. “.

“These stories are fabrications. The stories are simply incorrect about the cross-check program, which was designed to prevent possible over-application errors. It has nothing to do with being able to report posts, as alleged in the article,” Rosen posted on Twitter.

The Wire, in its response, published screenshots of the email from Meta’s director of political communications, Andy Stone, asking his team how information about XCheck was leaked. Andy’s email also asked to put the reporter and ThreadThe names of founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan will be put on the “watch list”.

“The journalist and ThreadFounding editor Siddharth Varadarajan should be added to this ‘watch list’ immediately, so that ‘any communication to them from our staff… will be reported directly to me,’ Andy’s email reportedly said. .