India ruling party official to sue critical news website

An official from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party said he would file civil and criminal charges against an independent local news website after it reported in a now-retracted story that Meta, the U.S.-based social media giant, granted him extraordinary powers to censor Instagram posts.
Amit Malviya, who is the IT head of the BJP, said Thursday he will sue the news website The Wire for publishing “forged documents with a view to malign and tarnish my reputation.”
Malviya’s planned legal action comes after The Wire, known for its critical reporting on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, wrote a series of sensational stories this month that claimed Malviya had been granted special powers by Meta to take down posts on Instagram without any input from the company’s content moderators.
To back this up, The Wire published screenshots of internal reports and emails it said it had accessed from sources within Meta. But former Meta employees and whistleblowers, tech experts in India and Silicon Valley, and Meta itself said the claims were untrue and questioned the authenticity of the evidence.