'Must Apologise': Parliamentary Panel To Summon Meta Over Zuckerberg's Remarks on Lok Sabha Polls

New Delhi, India: Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) MP and chairperson of the committee on communication and information technology, Nishikant Dubey said that his team will shortly summon Meta over its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement on poll loss incumbent governments after the Covid pandemic. 

“My committee will summon Meta over the false information. Misinformation about any democratic country tarnishes the image of the country. That organisation will have to apologise to the Indian Parliament and the people for this mistake,” Dubey wrote on X (formerly Twitter). 

“We have decided that we will summon the people of Meta. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has given a statement and shown that after Covid-19, an atmosphere has been created against the government where he has also mentioned India," Dubey later said.

“This statement by Mark Zuckerberg is alarming and shows that he is interfering in the democracy of the country and is misleading the world by giving wrong information that BJP- NDA has lost," he added.

“We have decided that we will summon the people of Meta. They will have to apologise or else action will be taken by our committee. We will speak to the members of the committee and between January 20 to January 24, we will ask them to be present," the BJP MP said.

Ashwini Vaishnaw Calls Out Zuckerberg's Meta 

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw called out Mark Zuckerberg's Meta for giving factually incorrect information about Lok Sabha election results 2024 saying it’s disappointing to see misinformation from Zuckerberg himself and asked him to uphold facts and credibility.

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “As the world’s largest democracy, India conducted the 2024 elections with over 640 million voters. People of India reaffirmed their trust in NDA led by PM Narendra Modi 's leadership.”

“Zuckerberg’s claim that most incumbent governments, including India in 2024 elections, lost post-COVID is factually incorrect,” he said.

“From free food for 800 million, 2.2 billion free vaccines, and aid to nations worldwide during COVID, to leading India as the fastest-growing major economy, PM Modi’s decisive 3rd-term victory is a testament to good governance and public trust,” he added.

Vaishnaw asked Meta that it's disappointing to see misinformation from Zuckerberg himself and asked him to uphold facts and credibility.

Lok Sabha results 2024

The Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP )-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi retained power at the Centre after it easily crossed the halfway mark. The NDA's tally stands at 293, more than 21 seats, needed for majority. 

The BJP alone won 240 seats in the Parliamentary elections while Congress managed to win just 99 seats.

The NDA won a total of 235,973,935 popular vote while the Opposition's INDI bloc popular vote stood at 136,759,064. Though the entire opposition (including those political parties who were far apart from each other ideology-wise and had huge differences) formed a united block – INDI – and contested elections against the Modi government but still lost the polls. Narendra Modi took oath as Prime Minister of India for the third consecutive times.  

Meta Dumps Fact-checkers 

Recently, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said it's scrapping its third-party fact checking programme and replacing it with a Community Notes programme written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact checking programme with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the programme because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.

Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model.

“We've seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.

The social media company also said plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” and censored too much content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by of Donald Trump 's presidential election victory.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards tower once again prioritising speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.