Source: Instagram removed 705 posts without moderator oversight flagged by Amit Malviya, who runs Indian nationalist party BJP's IT Cell, as part of XCheck
Seven posts by satirical account @cringearchivist were removed without any verification because the head of the BJP's … Tweets: @aroondeep , @therealnaomib , @jahnavi_sen , @baxiabhishek , @sharadraghavan , @bala__g , @tysonbrody , @akhmxt , @akm1410 , @jahnavi_sen , @svaradarajan , @rokhanna , @kaushikrj6 , @sundeepdougal , @mirakamdar , @samitbasu , and @szhang_ds Tweets: Aroon Deep / @aroondeep : Meta and the Indian government have a logic-defyingly cozy relationship, even at a time when WhatsApp is in court suing the government. There are a lot of bodies buried to facilitate that relationship, and this is the latest shocking one. https://twitter.com/... Naomi Barton / @therealnaomib : Meta seems to be under the impression that freedom of speech - both of your own, and of everyone else's - should belong to a hidden uber-elite group, one of which is @amitmalviya. https://twitter.com/... Jahnavi Sen / @jahnavi_sen : Thread: On @amitmalviya and a secret list of ‘elite’ users who can do as they please on @Meta platforms. https://twitter.com/... Abhishek Baxi / @baxiabhishek : The malware in your Instagram! Terrific story by @jahnavi_sen on @thewire_in. If BJP's IT Cell chief, Amit Malviya, reports your post, Instagram will take it down without any of the company's moderators looking at it. What the what, @Meta? https://thewire.in/... @sharadraghavan : An eye-opening report by @jahnavi_sen. The fact is, social media's beneficial impacts—organising support, coordinating protests, etc—are few and far between and all the more essential. The bread-and-butter of social media is to keep those in power happy. https://thewire.in/... Bala / @bala__g : “The company has given Malviya two levels of privileges - he can post as he likes, without the rules governing the platform applying to him, and he can impose his will as he pleases to have posts critical of the BJP..."| @jahnavi_sen 's exclusive https://twitter.com/... Tyson Brody / @tysonbrody : Wait meta gave a literal bjp party operative in India the ability to take down any post he wants but in the US we have to deal with the whole fake Supreme Court bs? https://twitter.com/... Kalim / @akhmxt : Facebook/Meta continues to give step child treatment to third world nations. The head of IT cell of India's ruling party has XCheck privilege and he is using it to shun critics. https://thewire.in/... https://twitter.com/... Ashish K. Mishra / @akm1410 : Wow. Documents accessed by The Wire confirms that BJP's Amit Malviya gets preferential treatment in India, the first such name to come out of South Asia, where he is on Instagram's XCheck list. https://thewire.in/... Jahnavi Sen / @jahnavi_sen : Exclusive: In September 2022, @amitmalviya reported 705 posts on Instagram. They were all taken down immediately - even when the reasons for reporting made no sense - because Malviya comes under Meta's controversial ‘XCheck’ list. https://thewire.in/... via @thewire_in Siddharth / @svaradarajan : Exclusive: If BJP's @AmitMalviya Reports Your Post, Instagram Will Take it Down, No Questions Asked Shocking story by @jahnavi_sen on the kind of power @Meta is giving @BJP4India to unlevel the political playing field. https://thewire.in/... Via @thewire_in Ro Khanna / @rokhanna : This censorship is wrong. In my book Dignity in a Digital Age, I have a chapter detailing the government led censorship on Facebook in several countries and the use of the platform to incite violence in places like Myanmar. https://twitter.com/... Kaushik Raj / @kaushikrj6 : Another instance of big tech companies reportedly favouring India's ruling party. https://twitter.com/... Sundeep Dougal / @sundeepdougal : “The compaany has given Malviya two levels of privileges - he can post as he likes, without the rules governing the platform applying to him, and he can impose his will as he pleases to have posts critical of the BJP, the Union government, or right-wing Hindu politics, deleted.” https://twitter.com/... Mira Kamdar / @mirakamdar : What is up with this @instagram ? https://twitter.com/... Samit Basu / @samitbasu : Make the trollchief the censor seems to be a policy across media now. https://twitter.com/... Sophie Zhang / @szhang_ds : The Wire reports that FB Instagram automatically takes down posts reported by major Indian Xchecked figures without any oversight. This isn't familiar to me, but that's no surprise as I wouldn't have encountered this. Some thoughts, if it's true (major caveat): https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a two-year arc of documented favoritism toward Modi's BJP inside Meta's India operation. In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook skipped hate-speech enforcement for at least four flagged individuals and groups (exemptions from hate-speech rules), and that executive Ankhi Das had backed the party internally before the 2014 election. A 2022 Al Jazeera analysis found Meta allowed a Jio Platforms subsidiary to run misinformation ads promoting the BJP while removing opposition surrogate ads.
The Wire's new claim is more structural than any single takedown: documents indicate Amit Malviya, who runs the BJP's IT Cell, sits on Instagram's XCheck list, and that 705 posts he reported were removed without moderator oversight — including seven from satirical account @cringearchivist taken down with no verification at all. When Meta publicly questioned the investigation, The Wire answered with alleged internal recordings, a subdomain, and DKIM signatures (its verification response), though outside experts remained skeptical.
First-order effects
- @cringearchivist loses seven satirical posts instantly and without human review, showing XCheck converts one politically connected user's reports into enforcement actions that bypass Instagram's own moderation process.
- Malviya's placement on the XCheck list gives the BJP's IT head what amounts to privileged takedown authority over Instagram content in India.
Second-order effects
- Meta is forced into a public rebuttal-and-defense cycle with The Wire — disputing the report, then facing published subdomain and DKIM evidence it must answer — turning its internal XCheck program into an externally audited controversy.
- The reporting lands while WhatsApp is separately suing the Indian government, tightening the contradiction between Meta's legal posture toward New Delhi and the operational coziness journalists keep documenting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the 2020 hate-speech exemptions, the Jio ads case, and now XCheck, India becomes the reference market for how platform moderation bends around ruling-party relationships — strengthening the case for regulators to treat VIP enforcement lists as a governance failure rather than a customer-service feature.
- Sustained scrutiny of XCheck-style programs pressures Meta to either dismantle preferential reporting lanes or formalize them with auditable oversight, a choice other platforms running similar 'high-profile user' systems will eventually face too.
The trend: Platform content moderation is being pulled from internal policy toward externally contested ground, as journalists and regulators chip away at exempted-user systems like XCheck that give political actors informal enforcement power.