New Delhi: Aft
By Jahnavi Sen and Siddharth Varadarajan /The Wire
New Delhi: After stonewalling questions about how an Instagram post critical of BJP leader Yogi Adityanath was rapidly taken down, Meta – the company that owns Instagram and Facebook – has called The Wire’s news report on BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya enjoying censor privileges “inaccurate and misleading” and said that the “underlying documentation appears to be fabricated”.
This claim, made in an email attributable to ‘Meta Spokesperson’ on October 11, came within hours of a similar assertion on Twitter by Andy Stone, the Washington-based policy communications director for Meta. Stone said that XCheck status – Meta superusers like Malviya for whom the platform’s usual rules of the road do not apply – “has nothing to do with the ability to report posts”. He added:
“The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans. And the underlying documentation appears to be fabricated.”
Stone’s tweet was an attempt to refute The Wire’s claim – which was backed by a copy of Instagram’s post-incident review report – that the takedown of the Adityanath post was prompted by a complaint from Malviya, which was rapidly acted upon given his XCheck status.
Stone’s public comments, though, are starkly in contrast to an internal email he sent to a group of Meta employees, asking “how the hell” the same document had been “leaked”. This email was shared with The Wire by a source at Meta and the screenshot is reproduced below. Stone sent it out at 10:34 EST, i.e. 20:04 IST, on October 10. The link Stone provided for the document is to the PDF of the Instagram post-incident report The Wire had uploaded – the very document that Stone and Meta would later publicly claim “appears to have been fabricated”.
In his internal email, Stone demanded an “activity report for the document for last one month” – presumably in order to identify the source of the leak – and also asked why the reporter on the story was not on Meta’s “watchlist”. He said that the reporter and The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan must immediately be added to this “watchlist”, so that “any communication to them from our staff… is directly reported to me”.
Andy Stone’s internal email to a group of Meta employees. Meta India public policy head Rajiv Aggarwal is also on the email thread.
Stone’s instruction in the email – that the reporter be contacted by someone from the India communications team – was quickly followed through. Rajiv Aggarwal, a former IAS officer who is now head of public policy for Meta in India, wrote back to him at 1045 EST/2015 IST saying he had “assigned a comms member from India to talk to the journalist”.
This story was originally published in thewire.in . Read the full story here
