Delhi Police Raided Houses Of The Wire Founders, Siezes Electronic Devices

Various electronic devices are were examined. Delhi Police has seized electronic devices (mobiles, laptops) from residences of Siddharth Varadarajan, MK Venu and others. “No notice given to anyone & no inquiry has taken place today. Further investigation is going on and necessary steps will be taken,” said Delhi Police.

This comes days after BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya lodged a complaint over their now withdrawn Meta reports. Days after threatening legal action against the portal for an article that claimed he had unique access that allowed him to remove posts from Instagram, which is owned by Meta, Malviya filed the case.

#WATCH | Delhi: Visuals from outside the residence of 'The Wire' founder Siddharth Varadarajan where Delhi Police crime Branch searches are underway. https://t.co/aNVJ4co0YC pic.twitter.com/Yd6pGaZ6TK

— ANI (@ANI) October 31, 2022

Social media giant  Instagram had taken down a video of Uttar Pradesh resident Prabhakar Maurya worshipping a statue of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, posted by the satirical anonymous account ‘Superhumans of Cringetopia’, it said the post violated the platform’s ‘nudity and sexual content guidelines. That was strange – both the man and the idol in the video were fully clothed, and there was no visible sexual connotation whatsoever, reported The Wire.

Also Read: “If BJP’s IT Cell Head Reports Your Post, Instagram Will Take It Down”: Reports

At the time, the administrators of the @cringearchivist handle – who refer to themselves as a group of academics and journalists – assumed that there was a mistake in the platform’s AI-run oversight mechanism, which had incorrectly flagged the post as portraying nudity.

Days after reporting on this confusing takedown, The Wire learned from a well-placed source at Meta that it was not, in fact, due to an algorithmic glitch. The post was taken down – and that too just minutes after it was posted – only because it was reported by Instagram user @amitmalviya. That’s the handle belonging to Amit Malviya, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s  IT Cell.

The Wire report further explained the internal Instagram report, which The Wire has accessed, makes clear that the reported post was taken down immediately without any of the company’s moderators looking at it, based simply on the identity of the reporter (Malviya). In fact, any post that Malviya reports is treated the same way – an immediate removal from the platform, no questions asked. Just in the month of September, the Meta source told The Wire, Malviya reported 705 posts on Instagram – all of which were taken down.

Other removed posts from the @cringearchivist page, The Wire learned, were also reported by none other than Malviya. While two were flagged for sexual content – the post on the Adityanath temple and another that amplified the voice of a female influencer who was posting about creepy DMs she got – the rest were taken down citing ‘extreme graphic violence, despite the videos not showing violence. Instagram’s rate and speed of takedowns had worried the handle’s administrators, who thought their page in its entirety may be deleted if this continued.