Meta executives faced questioning by Indian government officials for a second day on Thursday over the social media giant's compliance with local laws and issues pertaining to photo-sharing platform Instagram's content recommendation algorithms.
On Wednesday, the Meta team, including chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, had met with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) officials to resolve outstanding issues.
The company apologised for its lapses and expressed regret over the mistakes, acknowledging the concerns raised by the government during the meeting.
Meta also admitted that a lot of money had been paid to boost certain types of content on the platform, sources had told ET.
Apology sought
The second round of questioning of Meta's global team comes after the company restricted Prime Minister Narendra Modi's July 23 Facebook post addressing students and youth , and promising stringent action against examination paper leaks. The post remained unavailable for about five hours.
A Parliamentary Standing Committee sought an apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the removal of Modi's post, warning in a letter that protection and immunity could be withdrawn if no apology was forthcoming within three days.
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Committee chairman Nishikant Dubey said Meta should lose the safe harbour protection available to intermediaries under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act if Zuckerberg does not apologise for the incident.
Safe harbour is conditional legal protection given to websites that allow users to share content.
Sources told ET that during the meeting on Wednesday, Kaplan conveyed apologies from Zuckerberg . However, no public statement has been issued so far by the Meta CEO.
Concerns over deepfakes, CSAM
The Centre's discussion with Meta extended to child sexual abuse material surfacing on the company's platforms, deepfakes, safeguards for verified and prominent accounts, algorithmic bias, and compliance with Indian laws.
Over the next two-three days, government officials are also expected to discuss issues about global messaging platform WhatsApp. This comes after the Centre had sent a notice to WhatsApp over the rollout of its Username feature , which sparked fears of impersonation and fraud.
What happens next
Meta's technical team is scheduled to meet MeitY officials on Friday, too. The company's global team is expected to remain in India for a few more days, with three to four additional meetings likely to take place, as per media reports.
