
Mint Quick Edit | Meta’s meta-fiction shouldn’t bother us

Summary
- An Indian parliamentary panel wants to summon Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for misinformation on India’s electoral outcome. But can India’s image really be tarnished by his utterances?
Social media ushered in the world of “post-truth" as we know it, so it’ll be no small irony if the chief of Meta, which dominates it, is summoned by India’s parliamentary committee on communications and IT for “misinformation."
On Tuesday, the Indian panel’s head used X, a microblog platform, to say it would call Mark Zuckerberg and get Meta to apologize for his inclusion of India in a podcast reference to countries where incumbents lost elections last year because covid may have reduced public trust in government information.
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Speaking in the context of why Meta was reversing key aspects of its fact-check policy, Zuckerberg overlooked the fact that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had merely lost its majority in Parliament, not power.
While the parliamentary panel’s head complained of the country’s image being tarnished, another irony lies in the low likelihood of this.
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It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Meta’s shift on matters like diversity and fact-checking has been in response to the US presidential election winner’s criticism of its ways.
This weakens people’s confidence in Meta’s stance, impacting its credibility. India’s image can hardly be hurt by its CEO’s loose utterances.
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