New Delhi: Days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an erroneous statement on India’s election result, the Parliamentary Committee said it will summon officials from the social media platform.
Facebook founder Zuckerberg said during a podcast that all incumbents lost the elections last year, including the BJP-led NDA.
BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, chairperson of the committee on communications and information technology, said that he would send summons to Meta and ask the platform to apologise to India’s Parliament.
“My committee will call Meta for this wrong information. Wrong information in any democratic country tarnishes the image of the country. That organisation will have to apologise to the Indian Parliament and the people here for this mistake,” Dubey wrote on X.
The MP later said, “We have decided that we will summon the people of Meta. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has given a statement and shown that after COVID-19, an atmosphere has been created against the government where he has also mentioned India.”
“This statement by Mark Zuckerberg is alarming and shows that he is interfering in the democracy of the country and is misleading the world by giving wrong information that BJP-NDA has lost,” he added.
“They (Mera) will have to apologise or else action will be taken by our committee. We will speak to the members of the committee and between January 20 to January 24, we will ask them to be present,” Dubey stated.
Zuckerberg made the false statement on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, while discussing the global erosion of trust in governments following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of people in the United States focus on this as an American phenomenon, but I kind of think that the reaction to Covid probably caused a breakdown and trust in a lot of governments around the world, because 2024 was a big election year around the world. And you know there are all these countries, India, just like a ton of countries, that had elections and the incumbents, basically lost every single one of them,” Zuckerberg had said on the podcast.
