Parliamentary Panel to Summon Meta After Mark Zuckerberg’s Remark on India Polls: BJP MP

Parliamentary Panel to Summon Meta: Mr Nishikant Dubey, an MP of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who is the chair of the parliamentary committee on the issue of information and communication technology, said Tuesday that the committee would send a summons to Meta on the recorded statement issued by Mark Zuckerberg, the company CEO, assigning the reasons of his loss in the election in India in 2024 to the incumbent government because of handling of the Covid-19 issue.

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“My committee will summon Meta for this misinformation. Incorrect information tarnishes the image of any democratic country,” Dubey wrote on X.

“The organization will have to apologise to the Indian Parliament and the people of this country for this mistake,” he added.

"In the podcast after Covid, he actually said that people stopped trusting the government after that because the incumbent government went to vote in 2024, and all those governments had lost," he noted in one of his most recent media appearances since ending the third-party fact-checking system in the U.S. and making numerous controversial changes in content policies on his social network platforms.

“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 government 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. 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,” Zuckerberg had said.

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Union minister fact-checks Mark Zuckerberg

Ashwini Vaishnaw had accused the chairman of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, of making "hurtful comments" against the government in connection with the episode.

"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. @Meta, it’s disappointing to see misinformation from Mr. Zuckerberg himself. Let’s uphold facts and credibility," he wrote on X.

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