Social media company Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize to India following the platform’s unacceptable intervention in the political process of the country, a top government aide has said.
Zuckerberg apologized to an Indian parliamentary panel following the brief removal of a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kanchan Gupta, a senior advisor in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said in the latest episode of the ‘India, Russia, and the World’ podcast that the country’s sovereign rules should prevail over the boardroom rules of big tech companies.
Gupta pointed out that big tech platforms enjoy safe-harbor protection that shields them from criminal liability for anything that appears on their platform “provided they have not engineered it, provided they have no role in it.”
“When the platform intervenes in this manner, this is intervention in a country’s political process, and it is unacceptable,” he said, explaining why Meta officials were summoned by the Parliamentary Standing Committee.
“This is a violation of the safe harbor clause in (India’s) Information Technology Act. You can’t just do it and say sorry,” he said.
“The whole question is, what prevails,” he asked. “Does the law, sovereign law and sovereign rules of India prevail? Or do the boardroom rules of these big tech companies prevail?”
On the Western media’s coverage of the student protests in India, he said “there is some kind of a system in place which rewards the monsterization of India.”
Gupta admitted that the protests offered “a glimpse into the worldview of… the Gen Z generation,” but said no parallels could be drawn with protests in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal that toppled governments there.
Gupta described the growing percentage of Gen Zs in India’s electoral politics as a good thing. “It brings with it a certain freshness,” he said.
“Our politics has been of an accommodative nature… [the politicians] know when to step forward, they know when to stand still, and they know when to step back.”
He said India has a layered society with a youth that is politically and linguistically diverse. However, he slammed the “attempt to malign mainstream media” during protests.
Gupta said there is some accountability for television and print, but for “digital media, there’s no accountability at all.”
He said Western media needs to revisit its own ethical standards. “I won’t say morals, but at least ethical standards and how each day they violate them and how it ultimately hurts their own credibility.”
He added that “the white West controls the information order” with an inherent bias. “A white man’s paper will always carry greater clout than a black man’s paper or a brown man’s paper.”
He said that India knows how best to run its democracy, saying “we don’t like being preached” to about it.