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‘Victory’: BJP after Meta apologises for Zuckerberg's remarks on polls in India
Meta India apologised for the "inadvertent error" saying that India remains an incredibly important country for the tech conglomerate.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Nishikant Dubey on Wednesday termed as “victory of citizens of India” the apology by Meta for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg's remarks on the elections in the country in 2024.
In a post on X, Dubey said that Meta's India finally apologised for Zuckerberg's ‘mistakes’.
“The Indian Parliament and Government have the blessings and public trust of 140 crore people. @Meta The Indian official has finally apologized for his mistakes. This is the victory of the common citizens of India. By making Hon'ble Prime Minister Modi Ji @narendramodi the Prime Minister for the third time, the people have introduced the country's strongest leadership to the world,” Dubey wrote.
He added: "Now, the responsibility of our committee ends on this issue. We will call these social platforms in the future on other issues. Forgiveness suits the cobra who has poison. Jai Sansad, Jai Bharat."
What Meta said
Meta India’s vice president Shivnath Thukral apologised on Tuesday night for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that the incumbent government in India lost elections in 2024 due to its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Mark's observation that many incumbent parties were not re-elected in 2024 elections holds true for several countries, BUT not India,” Meta India’s vice president Shivnath Thukral wrote in a post on X on Tuesday, January 14. “We would like to apologise for this inadvertent error.”
Thukral also said that India remains an incredibly important country for the American multinational technology conglomerate. “We look forward to being at the heart of its innovative future,” he added.
The apology comes a day after BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, who heads the parliamentary committee on communications and information technology, said that his team would summon Meta over its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement.
What Zuckerberg said
In a podcast, part of a series of media appearances that Zuckerberg has made after announcing the end of the third-party fact-checking system for the US and a slew of controversial changes to his platforms’ content policies, Zuckerberg said that after Covid, people lost trust in information given by the governments because of which incumbent governments that went to polls in 2024 lost.
“It’s not just the US. I think a lot of the people in the US focus on this as a kind of an American phenomenon, but I kind of think that the reaction to Covid probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world. I mean 2024 was a big election year around the world and all these countries, India, just like a ton of countries that had elections and the incumbents basically lost every single one," he said.
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Zuckerberg added: "There is some sort of a global phenomenon where the whether it was because of inflation, because of the economic policies to deal with Covid or just how the governments dealt with Covid, it seems to have had this effect that is global, not just the US, but like a very broad decrease in trust, at least in that set of incumbents and maybe in sort of these democratic institutions overall.”
Earlier, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had also called out Zuckerberg over the “erroneous assertion” regarding the government, saying it was disappointing to see the billionaire spreading misinformation.
