India has summoned senior executives from Meta to clarify why a Facebook post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was temporarily blocked last week, a senior government official revealed on Thursday.
The post in question was a video message originally shared by Modi on Instagram before being cross-posted to Facebook, where it faced a brief restriction. Meta attributed the block to an inadvertent error at the time.
S. Krishnan, secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, stated that Meta has been asked to send top-level representatives to explain the situation, though he did not specify which executives were summoned.
Krishnan added that Meta informed Indian authorities about the implementation of new protocols for accounts of prominent public figures, aimed at preventing similar incidents in the future. Meta India did not immediately provide a comment on Thursday.
Modi’s video, posted on July 23, marked his first public response to widespread student protests that culminated in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the weekend. The video has since amassed over 404 million views on Instagram.
As Facebook’s largest user base is in India, this confrontation with Meta highlights the Modi government’s ongoing efforts to regulate Big Tech companies over content-related matters.
