Meta India on Wednesday apologised for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "inadvertent error" after he said the NDA government lost the 2024 Lok Sabha elections because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Meta India’s vice president Shivnath Thukral took to X, saying Zuckerberg's claim that many parties lost the general elections was true in the case of several countries.
"BUT not India," Thukral said. “We would like to apologise for this inadvertent error.”
The Meta official said India is an "incredibly important" country for the tech giant, which looks forward to join the nation's innovative future.
This comes a day after BJP lawmaker Nishikant Dubey said the parliamentary committee on communications and information technology headed by him will summon Meta over its CEO's remark.
However, after Meta India's apology, Dubey said it is a win for 140 crore Indians.
Zuckerberg made the remark in the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he said the handling of the pandemic made people lose their trust in their governments. "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." he said.
Earlier, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had also slammed Zuckerberg for making factually incorrect claims, saying it is disappointing to see misinformation from the Meta CEO. He pointed out that the Centre gave free food to 800 million people, 2.2 billion vaccines during Covid.