Parliamentary panel to summon Meta for Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on 2024 elections
In an interview, the Facebook co-founder claimed that several incumbent governments worldwide, including in India, were voted out of power last year.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology said on Tuesday that it plans to summon United States-based technology company Meta in response to its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s claims about incumbent governments being voted out of power in elections worldwide in 2024, including in India.
The decision was announced by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey, who heads the committee.
In an episode of the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, released on January 10, the Facebook co-founder said: “2024 was a big election year around the world, and there are all these countries, India, just like a ton of countries that had elections. And the incumbents basically lost every single one.”
Zuckerberg attributed this to citizens losing trust in incumbent dispensations due to their poor handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party secured 240 seat – down from the 303 seats it won in 2019. It fell short of the 272 seats needed for a simple majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha.
However, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured a total of 292 seats and the Hindutva party was able to form the government with its allies.
“My committee will summon Meta over the false information,” Dubey said in a social media post on Tuesday. “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.”
On Monday, Union Minister for Railways, Information and Broadcasting, and Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw called Zuckerberg’s statement “factually incorrect”.
“People of India reaffirmed their trust in [the] National Democratic Alliance [government] led by Prime Minister @narendramodi Ji’s leadership,” the minister said. “It’s disappointing to see misinformation from Zuckerberg himself. Let’s uphold facts and credibility”.
Zuckerberg’s comments came a week after he announced the end of Meta and Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system for the United States and the introduction of a crowdsourced fact-checking model similar to X’s Community Notes feature.
According to X, Community Notes “aim to create a better informed world by empowering people on X to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts”.
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