Meta apologises over Zuckerberg’s remark

“Dear Honourable Minister @AshwiniVaishnaw, Mark’s observation that many incumbent parties were not re-elected in 2024 elections holds true for several countries, BUT not India. We would like to apologise for this inadvertent error. India remains an incredibly important country for @Meta and we look forward to being at the heart of its innovative future,” Shivnath Thukral, vice president of public policy at Meta India, said on X in response to Vaishnaw’s post that pointed out that the Narendra Modi-led government was re-elected again in 2024 and asked Zuckerberg and Meta to “uphold facts and credibility”.

In the podcast episode released on January 10, 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. He said, “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.”

This snowballed into a controversy when Vaishnaw criticised Zuckerberg’s comments in a January 13 post and a YouTube comment on the Rogan video.

Thukral’s apology was followed by Lok Sabha MP Nishikant Dubey, who heads the parliamentary standing committee on communications and information technology, saying that the committee will no longer call Meta executives.

“@Meta The Indian official has finally apologized for his mistakes. This is the victory of the common citizens of India. … 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,” Dubey said in a post on X.

Dubey had said on Tuesday that he would ask members of the committee to summon Meta executives so that they apologise for Zuckerberg’s comments which “interfere with the democracy of India”.