NEW DELHI—India’s government has asked Facebook Inc. for details about how it monitors and removes inflammatory content on its platform in the country, according to government officials.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology wrote to Facebook’s top executive in India this week, the officials said. The letter follows news reports including a Wall Street Journal article Saturday that said Facebook researchers had determined the company’s services are rife with inflammatory content in India, much of it anti-Muslim.

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NEW DELHI—India’s government has asked Facebook Inc. for details about how it monitors and removes inflammatory content on its platform in the country, according to government officials.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology wrote to Facebook’s top executive in India this week, the officials said. The letter follows news reports including a Wall Street Journal article Saturday that said Facebook researchers had determined the company’s services are rife with inflammatory content in India, much of it anti-Muslim.

Based on the response from Facebook, the government will decide if it needs to seek more information, one of the officials said, adding that the present information sought was a preliminary inquiry.

Separately, the Journal last month reported that Facebook researchers had set up a test account as a female Indian user. It became “a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore,” they wrote in one internal document.

The reporting was based on a trove of internal documents reviewed by the Journal as part of its Facebook Files series.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment. A Facebook spokesman said in response to earlier Journal reports that it has a comprehensive strategy to keep people safe on its services, and that the company has invested significantly in technology to find hate speech across languages.

India’s Economic Times newspaper earlier reported that the ministry wrote to Facebook following recent news reports.

Separately, New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights organization, said Wednesday it has written to India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology calling for an inquiry into Facebook’s “real world harms” following the Journal’s articles and material made public by a former worker last year about the company’s global operations.

India is Facebook’s largest market by users, with hundreds of millions of users, and key to its future growth as more people get online in the country of more than 1.3 billion. Last year Facebook said it was investing $5.7 billion in India to expand its operations there.

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The company and other U.S. tech firms face growing challenges in the South Asian nation. The government has been making new rules that grant its leaders significant power over online discourse. The rules require tech companies to appoint executives who are resident in India to deal with government requests, and compel companies to remove content that undermines national security, public order and “decency or morality.”

India’s government has threatened to jail employees of Facebook, its WhatsApp messaging service, and Twitter Inc. if they didn’t comply with data or take-down requests, the Journal reported in February. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology didn’t respond to requests for comment at the time, and later disputed the Journal’s reporting.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has shown it is willing to act against popular social-media platforms. Last year it banned TikTok, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance Ltd., amid border tensions with China.

Twitter this year blocked, unblocked and then blocked again hundreds of accounts in India for posting material that the Indian government deemed inflammatory. The company has said it refused to take down other accounts despite the government’s orders.

Write to Rajesh Roy at rajesh.roy@wsj.com and Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com