Meta India apologises for Mark Zuckerberg’s remark on 2024 elections: ‘India remains incredibly important’

Meta India has apologised for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that the incumbent government in India lost elections in 2024 due to its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Mark’s observation that many incumbent parties were not re-elected in 2024 elections holds true for several countries, BUT not India,” Meta India’s vice president Shivnath Thukral wrote in a post on X on Tuesday, January 14. “We would like to apologise for this inadvertent error.”

Thukral also said that India remains an incredibly important country for the American multinational technology conglomerate. “We look forward to being at the heart of its innovative future,” he added.

The apology comes a day after BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, who heads the parliamentary committee on communications and information technology, said that his team would summon Meta over its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement.

“My committee will summon Meta for this misinformation. Incorrect information tarnishes the image of any democratic country,” Dubey wrote on X.

“The organization will have to apologise to the Indian Parliament and the people of this country for this mistake,” he added.

Earlier, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had also called out Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg over the “erroneous assertion” regarding the government, saying it was disappointing to see the billionaire spreading misinformation.

“As the world’s largest democracy, India conducted the 2024 elections with over 640 million voters. The people of India reaffirmed their trust in the NDA led by PM Narendra Modi’s leadership. Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that most incumbent governments, including India in the 2024 elections, lost post-COVID is factually incorrect,” Vaishnaw said.

What Zuckerberg said

In a podcast, part of a series of media appearances that Zuckerberg has made after announcing the end of the third-party fact-checking system for the US and a slew of controversial changes to his platforms’ content policies, 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.

“It’s not just the US. I think a lot of the people in the US focus on this as a kind of an American phenomenon, but I kind of think that the reaction to Covid probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world. 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,” he said.

Zuckerberg added: “There is some sort of a global phenomenon where the whether it was because of inflation, because of the economic policies to deal with Covid or just how the governments dealt with Covid, it seems to have had this effect that is global, not just the US, but like a very broad decrease in trust, at least in that set of incumbents and maybe in sort of these democratic institutions overall.”