Meta Platforms’ chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, has apologised to India’s information technology minister over the brief restriction of a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July.
“I apologised to the minister on behalf of Meta for the error restricting PM Modi’s post,” Kaplan said in a statement on Wednesday.
India’s information and technology ministry summoned Meta executives last month after Facebook briefly blocked the post. Meta said at the time that the restriction was inadvertent and the result of an operational error.
The episode is one of several recent friction points between Meta and Modi’s government over content relating to the prime minister. Police in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad registered a case against Meta India head Arun Srinivas over videos posted on Facebook that allegedly depicted Modi in an “abusive manner”, Reuters reported last week, citing a senior police officer.
Those videos circulated as Modi faced the largest wave of youth-led protests India has seen in more than a decade. The demonstrations, over leaked national examination papers, culminated in the resignation of his education minister, and have been accompanied by sustained online criticism and ridicule directed at the prime minister.
Separately, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologised to the Indian government over child sexual abuse material, deepfake content and other operational lapses on the company’s platforms, financial news publication Moneycontrol and other local outlets reported earlier on Wednesday. The apology was said to have been delivered during a meeting between Meta executives and Indian government officials. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In July the Indian government ordered Meta to remove advertisements and content promoting child sexual abuse material on Instagram, the BBC reported, citing a senior official at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Meta said at the time that it had a zero-tolerance policy on such material and was continuing to strengthen its detection systems.
Source: Ada Derana.
