An Indian news website has removed four investigative reports it published on Meta after a controversy.
The reports, published by The Wire, said a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had privileges on Instagram to have posts removed.
Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – denied the allegations and said that the documents the website gave as proof were “fabricated”.
On Tuesday, The Wire said it would hold an internal review of all its material.
A statement on the news site said that the four articles on Meta would be withheld from public view until findings of the review determined a future course of action.
The Wire’s reports cited internal emails and documents reportedly from Meta that proved that the BJP member had special privileges.The tech giant, however, said the reports were based on false information.
Guy Rosen, Meta’s chief information security officer, said that an internal email published in The Wire report was “fake”.
Social media websites in India have been under pressure from the government to act swiftly on its requests to remove content and ban individuals or groups.
In July this year, Twitter filed a petition in the Karnataka High Court alleging that the Indian government “disproportionately used power” to issue “arbitrary” content blocking orders.
In one of The Wire’s reports – now withheld by the news site – it said that Instagram had deleted a satirical post that showed a man worshipping a statue of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, saying it violated the platform’s guidelines on “nudity and sexual content” .
On Tuesday, the Instagram account said its post had been “silently restored” by Meta.