A senior global executive at Meta met Indian officials on Wednesday and apologised for a video message by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook being taken down for five hours, according to a statement by the company that owns the social media website.
The apology was tendered by Meta's chief global officer Joel Kaplan to Union minister for electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw during a meeting earlier in the day. “I apologised to the minister on behalf of Meta for error restricting PM Modi’s post,” a statement from Meta cited Kaplan as saying.
HT reached out to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for a comment on Wednesday's discussions but did not get one immediately.
The meeting and the apology came after Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey, who heads the parliamentary committee on IT, said Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg had three days to apologise for the removal of PM Modi's video and threatened to withdraw statutory immunity if it was not done.
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The Union government had summoned Meta's top global executives after Modi's Facebook post addressing Indian youth on July 28 and promising stringent action against paper leaks was briefly restricted on the platform. Dubey had said the post was unavailable between 12.30am and 5.30am.
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The Union government had summoned Meta's top global executives after Modi's Facebook post addressing Indian youth on July 28 and promising stringent action against paper leaks was briefly restricted on the platform. Dubey had said the post was unavailable between 12.30am and 5.30am.
The controversy came days after the former education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned amid widespread student protests.
In addition to meeting Vaishnaw, Kaplan and his colleagues also held a separate meeting with IT secretary S Krishnan.
While the US-headquartered social media giant had attributed the incident to a technical glitch and apologised, MeitY said it had found the explanation "inadequate". The company, which owns Facebook, said that the content was removed "in error" and was subsequently restored on the platform.
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Besides an apology over removal of PM Modi’s video, the parliamentary standing committee on information technology demanded action against intermediary platforms that carry child sexual abuse material (CSEAM) and demeaning material against women, a government official said, asking not to be named.
Meta executives did not comment on the nature of discussions in these areas.
Meta’s content moderation systems separately came under scrutiny after a BBC Eye investigation earlier reported observing around 30 unique advertisements allegedly promoting child sexual abuse material, which it reported to the platform and Indian authorities.
"There are a range of issues...the CSAM issue was raised, so what measures have been taken regarding that, and synthetically generated information ... to what extent that is being looked at. Then, for prominent personalities when they have verified accounts, if content has to be taken down, there have to be safeguards...all of these will be the issues (taken up)," Krishnan told reporters on Tuesday after a separate meeting with Meta’s Indian executives.
"We would like to understand from them (Meta) as to why some of these things have not been working the way they are supposed to work, and what are the challenges," he added.