The Wire has filed a complaint with Delhi police against its employee Devesh Kumar, after BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya had got an FIR registered against the news portal for publishing “fake stories”.

The Wire editor Siddharth Varadarajan told The Telegraph that the police complaint accused Kumar, a researcher with the news portal, of supplying the media outlet with fabricated material on Meta and Instagram with the intent to damage its reputation and harm its employees.

Malviya’s complaint alleged that The Wire had “forged documents with a view to malign and tarnish” his reputation.

A series of reports The Wire had published this month said that Malviya had used special privileges given to him by Meta (the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) to take down over 700 posts critical of the BJP. The news portal retracted the reports on October 27, apologised to its readers and promised to tighten its vetting processes.

The FIR was registered against The Wire, its founding editors Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M.K. Venu, deputy editor and executive news producer Jahnavi Sen, and unnamed others.

They have been booked under penal sections 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery with the purpose of cheating), 469 (forgery for harming reputation), 471 (using forged documents), 500 (defamation), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (common intention).

A PTI report said The Wire’s complaint alleged that Kumar had a “malintent” towards the news portal, its editors, and staff and had “supplied fabricated material, including the documents and e-mails and videos from Instagram and Meta”. It said Kumar had done so to “damage its reputation”, acting “either on his own or at the behest of other unknown persons”.

According to the retracted reports, Meta gave certain privileges to Malviya through its “XCheck list” or “Cross Check” programme, allowing him to take down any content that he thought was critical of the government or the BJP.

The Wire had said its reports were based on sources from Meta, which denied the claim.

On October 27, The Wire wrote an editorial titled “To Our Readers, an Apology and a Promise”, acknowledging that “the internal editorial processes which preceded publication of its Meta stories did not meet the standards that we set for ourselves and readers expect from us”.

The news portal said it was reviewing its internal editorial processes to identify and plug any shortcomings.

“That process of review is still under way, but one clear editorial learning which can already be stated with certainty is that complex technological evidence — whether brought by someone who is part of the newsroom or a freelancer – and all verification processes that involve technical skill, must be cross-checked by independent and reputed experts in the field,” it said.

“Had we done this before publication rather than after the fact, this would have ensured that the deception to which we were subjected by a member of our Meta investigation team was spotted on time.”

Malviya, however, noted that the news portal had not offered him an apology despite “maligning and tarnishing my reputation and causing serious harm to my professional career”, PTI reported.