The Union government has summoned a team from Meta to India on August 5 and 6 to seek an explanation over the brief removal of a video featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Facebook, according to Electronics and IT Ministry Secretary S Krishnan.
The video, posted on July 28, showed the Prime Minister advising students amid protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar over the alleged leak of the NEET undergraduate medical entrance exam question paper. It was suddenly taken down from Facebook, but was restored within a few hours.
Facebook described the incident as a technical glitch and issued an apology. The matter was also discussed in a meeting of Parliament’s standing committee on communications and information technology, chaired by BJP Lok Sabha MP Nishikant Dubey.
The committee recommended that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should apologise for the removal. Krishnan said the government will question Meta’s team about what it called improper action on important accounts and stressed the need to ensure leading technology firms function as intended.
