Ire on Twitter as piece on Modi vanishes from FB
21 Nov 2015
People on social media like Twitter are venting their anger after an article about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the UK in 2003 disappeared from their Facebook timeline and they were unable to share it further.
Despite Facebook's clarification that the company did not block the piece and its engineers were looking into reasons as to why it disappeared, speculation on Twitter was that Facebook might have taken the story down because of the close relationship between its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Modi has not stopped.
Zuckerberg, who hosted the PM at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters in September, is trying hard to woo the Indian government to push his company's controversial Free Basics (formerly Internet.org) project in India.
The article titled When Mr Modi Went To London has been written by Satyabrata Pal, who was India's deputy high commissioner in London during Modi's visit to the United Kingdom, for The Wire on 17 November.
Pal said he wrote the piece to ''keep the record straight'' about Modi's visit to London as the chief minister of Gujarat, adding that it was a ''nerve-racking and politically fraught affair'' unlike what the Prime Minister recently claimed.
The piece was shared on Facebook over a thousand times until it vanished.
Worse, people were unable to share it on Facebook anymore, and were simply greeted with an error message from the world's largest social network saying that the content they were trying to post was ''abusive''.