Meta Platforms' Chief Global Officer Joel Kaplan has apologized to India’s IT minister for temporarily blocking access to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tweet in July due to an internal technical glitch.
Meta Platforms' Chief Global Officer Joel Kaplan has apologized to India’s IT minister for temporarily blocking access to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tweet in July due to an internal technical glitch.
This is stated in the statement of the top manager, cited by Reuters.
«I apologized to the minister on behalf of Meta for the error related to restricting access to Prime Minister Modi’s post», Kaplan noted.
The incident occurred last month when India’s Ministry of Information and Technology summoned Meta’s management after it briefly blocked a post by Modi on Facebook. The company explained this as an accidental operational error. The situation escalated against the backdrop of the largest youth protests in a decade in India, provoked by the leak of national exam questions, which already led to the resignation of the education minister. At that time, a wave of criticism and memes against the government were raging on social media.
Tensions reached a new level when police in the Indian city of Hyderabad filed a criminal case against Meta India head Arun Srinivas for sharing videos on Facebook that depicted Modi in an offensive light.
In addition, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during a meeting with Indian government representatives, apologized for the platform’s operational shortcomings, the spread of deepfakes, and materials related to the sexual exploitation of children.
In July, the Indian government ordered Meta to immediately remove ads and content that depicted child sexual abuse from Instagram. In response, the tech giant declared a zero-tolerance policy against such material and assured that it was constantly improving its systems for detecting it.
