The extreme lengths that these people seem to have gone to is shocking. Whatever it is, FB has the evidence on their servers as Alex Stamos points out since they created a Workspace instance.
My read is that he wants this story to be true so much that he’s ignoring evidence to the contrary.
As for why the source is doing this, I couldn’t say.
It also takes a special level of suspension of disbelief to think that Andy Stone somehow writes emails in Indian English and that XCheck gives privileges to takedown content from other users.
There’s plenty Gawker did that I didn’t like or didn’t care for, but as a proponent of free speech, I see nothing positive about them losing that shit.
Edit: lol, no wonder parent & gp were circumspect on names - I'm getting downvoted :'-D Anyhow, here are my sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-t...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/the-b...
At the time there was a story about the Saudi's being involved and some link to Trump.
Years later it came out that Bezos's investigator knew pretty early on that it was likely the brother of Bezos's girlfriend, however the National Enquirer was already in trouble for allegedly acting as a foreign agent for the Saudi's. By seeding the fake Saudi story they were able to apply huge pressure on the Enquirer.
Maybe something similar is happening here, Meta is under legal pressure somewhere on this topic. It doesn't have to be true, it just has to annoy the wrong politician/judge.
I was initially extremely sympathetic to the story presented by The Wire, because it's quite believable that Meta/FB would go to extreme lengths to try to distance themselves from such a situation, but the facts ... just ... don't add up. As Alex Stamos has noted, there is little debate regarding collusion between Meta's "government relations" people and policy groups, so that's not really much of a scandal -- it's not like Meta will deny that Modi was treated like a divine being when he visited their campus, so the idea that his people can easily call in a favor to crush a social media post won't really surprise anyone.
The bulletproof evidence with DKIM authentication and a video of a logged-in admin instance doesn't look so bulletproof after all, based on the credible reports from those who know how Meta's admin tooling actually looks and functions, and those with other DKIM authenticated emails from the fb.com domain.
So, the question is, what's the agenda here? Why would someone go through all of this effort, to create a scandal out of something that is not very far from the truth? What's the point of this entire thing? Maybe this is like Nick Denton and Gawker losing their entire business over the stupidest sex tape story ever; or maybe this is part of something else that requires domain knowledge regarding Indian politics and media to understand (do page views monetize so well that this mini-scandal is going to be super-profitable to The Wire? Highly doubtful, right? What could they possibly get out of this?).
The whole thing is just really weird. It's also a major distraction from the very real problems that Meta doesn't even try to hide. Meta's relationship with the governments in various countries -- including the United States -- is way too close for comfort, and absolutely toxic on multiple levels. If this story turns out to be fake news, it'll do a lot to help the company deny, deflect and discredit the next real scandal. I think this is what the wacky conspiracy theorists call "4D chess," but I don't think that's what's happening here.
The true story behind all of this is bound to be very strange, and very stupid.