India seeks apology from Meta for ‘tarnishing’ country’s image

NEW DELHI

India has sought an apology from social media giant Meta over comments by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the country’s general elections last year.

New Delhi also said it will summon representatives of Meta to a parliamentary committee briefing in the next few days.

“Wrong information in any democratic country tarnishes the image of the country. That organization will have to apologize to the Indian parliament and the people here for this mistake,” Nishikant Dubey, who chairs parliament’s committee on communications and information technology, wrote on X.

The statement came after Zuckerberg said in a podcast with the American TV host Joe Rogan that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost last year’s elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic

“I kind of think that the reaction to COVID probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world, because 2024 was a big election year around the world. And you know, there are all these countries — India, just like a ton of countries — that had elections, and the incumbents basically lost every single one of them,” he said.

Indian Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Monday that Zuckerberg’s claim that “most incumbent governments, including India’s, in 2024 elections lost post-COVID is factually incorrect.”
“As the world’s largest democracy, India conducted the 2024 elections with over 640 million voters. People of India reaffirmed their trust in the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led by PM Narendra Modi’s leadership,” he said.

Modi’s BJP lost its majority in elections held last year and is leading a government with support from smaller allies under the umbrella of the NDA.

India boasts a huge number of social media users and many have complained that their social media handles have been barred inside the world’s most populated nation.

In 2023, the Indian government informed parliament that between January 2018 and October 2023, it blocked 36,838 social media Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in the country.

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