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”.

WhatsApp messages from a member of Meta India’s communications team

Starting at 20:48 on Monday, The Wire’s reporter received three calls and then WhatsApp messages from a member of Meta India’s communications team. In the subsequent conversation, the communications team member said the same thing Stone would later put out in his tweet – but also added that this conversation was “off the record” because they weren’t a spokesperson. The person said an official Meta statement would be sent to The Wire; this was eventually received on Tuesday:

“X-check has nothing to do with the ability to report posts. The posts in question were surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans. And the underlying documentation appears to be fabricated. Overall, the article is inaccurate and misleading.” – Meta Spokesperson

While the Meta spokesperson repeats the same “fabricated” charge, Stone’s internal email makes it clear that Meta is not only aware of the documentation’s authenticity but is upset about how a copy leaked to The Wire.

The Wire has reached out to Andy Stone and Rajiv Aggarwal at Meta for their response to this story, and also to Amit Malviya. The story will be updated as and when they reply.

When The Wire first reached out to Meta to ask why Instagram posts from satirical account @cringearchivist’s handle were taken down citing bizarre reasons – including ‘nudity and sexual content’ for a post that showed neither of the two – all we got was a generic response from a PR company, asking for the takedown notification screenshot to be attached (even though the attachment was in the original email too).

Questions sent to Meta on September 28, 2022 and repeated in subsequent follow-ups. Meta has not replied to these questions till date.

“It seems like an attachment was missed as part of your query. Can we request you to please share it over here for our reference, so that we are able to flag it off to the relevant teams at Meta?” the email from an employee of PR agency Weber Shandwick said. No response was ever sent and The Wire published its story on October 10.

With the published story generating traction among tech reporters in the United States, Meta chose to break its silence, with Stone taking to Twitter to make his “fabricated” claim.

Andy Stone’s tweets claiming that the document embedded in The Wire’s report ‘appears to be fabricated’.

Stone’s tweets say that the posts were “surfaced for review by automated systems, not humans”. However, the notifications received by @cringearchivist – the Instagram account which uploaded the post – show that the post on Adityanath was “reviewed” twice. The Wire has asked Stone if both these reviews were carried out by automated systems. This article will be updated if he responds.

In a further corroboration of the document’s authenticity, the dates on the review notifications received by @cringearchivist also match with the dates generated by the millisecond timestamps mentioned in the internal Instagram report published by The Wire, along with the comments “Review not required” and “Review denied”.

Top: Notifications received by @cringearchivist about their Adityanath post. Bottom: Details of Instagram internal review process for the same post.

Shortly after The Wire’s article was published on October 10, a former senior employee in Meta’s privacy and security team reached out via the email address The Wire advertises for whistleblowers to say that they had raised concerns about the kinds of people being given XCheck privileges back in 2019-20, and remembered Malviya’s name as being in that list from India.

The former senior Meta employee’s first email to The Wire.

Later, after Stone’s tweets attempting to discredit The Wire’s reporting, the former senior employee responded to The Wire’s request to publish their email by calling Stone a “pathological liar” and citing a 2021 article about him in InputMag.

The former senior Meta employee’s second email to The Wire.

Meta’s controversial XCheck programme was first reported by Jeff Horwitz in the Wall Street Journal in September 2021. This is the first time details of its deployment in India have emerged.