Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament (MP) Nishikant Dubey wants Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to apologise after a video of Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi was briefly withheld by Facebook in India.
Dubey, who chairs the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, said that “Safe harbour protection should be withdrawn from these platforms if they do not act according to the law of the country,” adding that the algorithms driving the platforms are controlled by “foreign powers.”
The Ministry of Electronics and IT had earlier summoned Meta’s global policy heads over the same incident, an Indian news outlet had reported, citing sources. Dubey said that the government had strongly criticised all social media platforms for taking down the prime minister’s video for five hours.
Sources told the media outlet that top executives from all the social media platforms had apologised to the government and explained that their algorithms automatically detect and delete deepfake videos, with the PM’s video likely caught up in the process. The government did not accept the explanation, according to the reported sources.
Dubey said that the parliamentary committee remained unanimous on the issue across party lines, calling it a non-partisan matter and said that the public would learn what Meta India, X and YouTube had done. He pointed to algorithmic viewership figures showing that content from the BJP, Congress, Samajwadi Party and Aam Aadmi Party combined reached 23 million people, while accounts belonging to neither a registered party nor a registered NGO, some of which he said were inciting unrest, reached 27 million. He cited an anti-reservation forum formed five to six days earlier that had already reached seven million, attributing this to platform policies that favour newer accounts over older, established ones.
