India demands apology from Meta over Zuckerberg’s comments on 2024 elections
This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, U.S., shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo. (AFP Photo)
India has demanded an apology from Meta, the social media giant, following comments made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding the country’s general elections last year.
New Delhi also has announced plans to summon Meta representatives to a parliamentary committee briefing in the coming 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.
‘World’s largest democracy’
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.
