Facebook says it blocked all posts with “#ResignModi” in India due to a mistake and not due to a government order, and the posts have now been restored
Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.”
TechCrunchManish Singh
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after India said Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had complied with orders to remove pandemic-related criticism, Facebook’s claim that the hashtag block was an error makes the distinction between formal state action and its own moderation operations unusually consequential. The restoration puts that explanation at the center of Facebook’s response.
Later coverage of Instagram removals without oversight in India and X’s reported compliance with an Indian order shows that questions over who initiated a takedown—and how it was reviewed—persisted beyond this incident.
First-order effects
Facebook has restored posts carrying #ResignModi in India and is investigating the block, returning access to users whose posts were swept up by the error.
Facebook must publicly separate the hashtag-wide block from the Indian government’s contemporaneous takedown requests, rather than leave both actions appearing to be one intervention.
Second-order effects
The close timing with India’s reported orders to platforms raises the scrutiny Facebook faces over its escalation and review procedures for politically sensitive content.
Instagram and other platforms operating in India face a clearer accountability problem: removals attributed to internal systems can produce the same speech restrictions as government-directed takedowns.
Third-order effects
The episode points to a content-governance environment in which platform mistakes and state demands can be difficult for users to distinguish, increasing the value of auditable moderation and disclosure processes.
India’s later rule requiring platforms to address government-defined misleading content, alongside X’s reported takedowns under an Indian order, suggests state pressure and platform enforcement processes will remain closely intertwined.
The trend: Social platforms in India are facing a durable transparency challenge as internal moderation failures and government content demands increasingly converge on the same political speech.
There was no good explanation for what Facebook did in India today. Either it blocked political speech on behalf of a government request or it screwed up in its largest market where there was already major scrutiny for its handling of political content. Pick your poison. https://…
To define this better, Facebook was blocking people from seeing these #ResignModi posts, but it's unclear if they were blocking people from *publishing* #ResignModi posts. So we know FB was preventing reach, but was it preventing speech? FB won't answer our questions.
Facebook is “looking into” why the #ResignModi hostage was blocked. Literally ignoring the reason staring at their face, which every one of their India users knows. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook is blocking posts with the #ResignModi around the world. It's unclear why, and Facebook declined to comment on why it's doing so. We will update as we learn more. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
The context: India is in a COVID-19 crisis and citizens are angry at the Modi-led government. Twitter, FB and Instagram previously took down critical posts at the request of the government. Now FB is blocking what appears to be more political speech. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/…
Isn't it kinda weird that it took a western journalist(s) sounding the alarm for facebook to respond? Like even this tweet is a response to the western journalist and not the original tweet, which was by an Indian. https://twitter.com/...
Big Tech deciding to censor a few American racists is not the same thing as Big Tech playing handmaiden to illiberal autocratic tendencies in other countries. https://twitter.com/...
It's so grim that tech companies keep doing this. The only place it plays well at all is within the Indian government and in the minds of authoritarians the world over. https://twitter.com/...
Can everyone here pls ask @Facebook @FacebookIndia if they have been pressurized by @BJP4India or @reliancegroup to block hashtag #ResignModi on Facebook? Is it because of Reliance-Facebook joint business deals? Just to reconfirm the truth, though we all know it. https://twitter.…
These so called Social Media companies discriminate alot For them USA and its democracy matters but not India and its democracy Whether it's @Facebook or @Twitter itself Double standards https://twitter.com/...
What makes any1 think that FB will censor pol. posts only in US ? Those supporting FB's interference with the pol. process in their own country, should be least surprised if it follows the same recipe elsewhere. PS: FB is in partnership with Ambani, a big business supporting Modi…
Good. When you find out please tell us what happened? Who in the India office took the call & why? Did you receive a message from the government or the ruling party (your main advertiser in India, I believe) to that effect? For transparency sake, we would like answers to these. h…
They're a private platform here so they can definitely do this under US law. Under Indian law, no one is going to stop them and @newley @JeffHorwitz have owned that beat. It's certainly a super bad look and solidifies their collusion with power rather than democracy. https://twit…
Just remember, unlike Twitter, Facebook was unwilling to put blatantly false election information behind a warning label like this. They're are a rotten company. https://twitter.com/...
Is there anything to stop a case like this put to the Facebook Oversight Board? A truly independent board would surely look at important issues like this... https://twitter.com/...