He travelled for almost a month, and visualising a world where people had a stronger ability to connect reinforced the importance of Facebook as a platform for him.
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“And that is something that I’ve always remembered over the last 10 years as we’ve built Facebook,” Zuckerberg said, as Modi proudly led the claps, delighted to learn of India’s role in Facebook’s success story.
This town hall wasn’t just a casual tete-a-tete. While pictures of Zuckerberg getting one of Modi’s popular hugs dominated news headlines, the meeting was also a declaration of the common vision the two men shared at the time—carving out a digital India.
Ahead of the town hall, both Modi and Zuckerberg changed their Facebook profile pictures through a special filter, tinting them with the three colours of the Indian flag to display their support for a digital India.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 along with four fellow Harvard students. Over the years, the transformation of Facebook, now Meta, has been often discussed alongside Zuckerberg’s own transformation from wearing the same outfit every day to wearing chains and becoming a devotee of jiu-jitsu.
Its latest decision to abandon independent fact-checking and replace it with Community Notes has widely been attributed to his attempts to gather favour with newly voted-in President Donald Trump in the US.
However, lawyer and founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, Apar Gupta believes that neither Facebook as a corporation nor its founders have ever strongly held any well-defined ideological objectives beyond profit, accessibility and growing the company’s dominance.
He asserts that once we understand this, we can understand the inconsistencies and the changes which have occurred over time. According to him, there are changes that have occurred in society as well, and “for a company to be successful, requires them to navigate these changes”.
“This can clearly explain why Trump is removed from a platform after he stops being President, or is courted by the same technology company,” he told ThePrint.
Meanwhile, back in India, 10 years after the Zuckerberg-Modi bear hug, Meta India’s vice-president of public policy, Shivnath Thukral, had to post a public apology this month after Zuckerberg said in a podcast that in elections around the world in 2024, most incumbent governments, including the one in India, had been voted out of power.
Following Zuckerberg’s statement, IT and Information & Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw called him out for furthering “misinformation”.
In a post on X, Vaishnaw called the Meta CEO’s claim “factually incorrect”, and asserted that Prime Minister Modi’s decisive third-term victory was a testament to good governance and public trust.
BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Communication and Information Technology, also escalated the issue, saying that the panel would summon Meta representatives and seek an apology for Zuckerberg’s remarks.
Thukral quickly stepped in to mitigate the fallout and issued a public apology, tagging Vaishnaw, for the “inadvertent error”.
The tweet went on to emphasise that “India remains an incredibly important country for Meta and we look forward to being at the heart of its innovative future”—a statement that sums up Meta’s love-hate relationship with India over the years, with India being one of its most important markets but also one of its most controversial ones.
From its alleged role in influencing electoral processes to its purported neglect of hate speech, political parties across the spectrum have accused Facebook of helping each other. But no concrete action has been taken against the social media platform’s alleged infractions.
“The biggest criticism has been the lack of transparency in how it has implemented its content moderation practices, in which it has quite often not taken down posts and materials which have had elements of hate speech attached to it. It has not been transparent about when and how it decides what to remove,” Gupta explains.
As a result, the social media giant has maintained its image as a powerful silent player in the Indian political landscape, slithering its way out of any controversies that come its way. Meanwhile, political parties as well as lawmakers continue to leverage the platform to rally support and shape public opinion.
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Free basics
Facebook’s rendezvous with India dates back to the early days of the social media giant.
Just before Facebook went public in May 2012, it was hailed as the hottest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the century with a valuation of over $100 billion.
However, along with the promise, its official filings also included a warning: if Facebook failed to increase its user base and user engagement, its future growth potential may be adversely affected.
This is where the India story has been crucial for the tech giant.
Even before its IPO, Facebook’s primary strategy was focussed on expanding its user base across geographies, including relatively less-penetrated, large markets like India. Since Facebook was banned in China, India was the next big market with big potential.
Zuckerberg reinforced his focus on India in October 2015 during a speech at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi where he said India was central to Facebook’s plans of connecting the next billion people and then the whole world.
By 2015, India was already Facebook’s largest market—outside the US—with more than 130 million users, and India was central to its plans of connecting the whole world.
A year before this, in October 2014, Zuckerberg launched ‘internet.org’, a global Internet project aimed at bringing Internet connectivity to two-thirds of the global population, in India.
The project was introduced in more than 30 countries and its founding members were Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.
In November 2015, Zuckerberg announced that all Reliance subscribers across India would be able to access free Internet, for limited basic services, via Facebook’s Free Basics. The project intended to give free access to a limited number of internet services.
Facebook and Reliance Communications’ advertisements for the service showed five youngsters looking into a mobile phone, laughing, with the tagline, “If the sun is free…If the air is free …Then why shouldn’t the internet be free?”
Despite these grand ambitions, India would soon become the ground for one of Facebook’s biggest setbacks in the world.
The lost battle
Free Basics faced immediate criticism, with experts alleging it violated net neutrality principles and posed a threat to India’s democracy.
Critics called it a “battle for internet freedom”, saying that if Free Basics and its peer programmes were allowed to continue, “it would leave us all with poorer access to the Internet, and take away our right to choose”.
While the scheme offered free access to a limited number of websites, net neutrality supporters argued that data providers should not favour some online services over others. The free content included selected local news, weather forecasts, Wikipedia and certain health-related websites.
The criticism even forced Zuckerberg to defend the service through an editorial in The Times of India on 28 December, 2015, where he urged India to “choose facts over fiction”.
He also accused critics of spreading false claims about the service, writing, “Instead of recognising the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.”
In a strong appeal, Zuckerberg insisted the programme was not driven by Facebook’s commercial interests, pointing out that there were no ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics.
However, in February 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released the Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations 2016, which effectively buried Free Basics.
The regulations prohibit any service provider from offering or charging discriminatory tariffs for data services based on content. An explanatory memorandum attached to the regulations said that the prohibition of discriminatory tariffs for data services was necessary to ensure that service providers fulfil their obligations in keeping the internet “open and non-discriminatory”.
The regulations were a big win for net neutrality in India but served as the final nail in the coffin for Facebook’s Free Basics services.
Within days, Facebook announced that its Managing Director in India, Kirthiga Reddy, would step down and return to the US.
However, despite the widespread speculation and the timing of the move, the company said that during her time in India, she was not involved in the Free Basic service efforts.
The love?
Despite its loss on Free Basics, India remains a significant Meta market.
Much like other countries, Facebook’s role in influencing elections has been a subject of debate, with both the ruling party and the opposition repeatedly raising questions.
One of the first major storms that engulfed not just Facebook but also the integrity of the democratic processes in India was the 2018 Cambridge Analytica controversy.
The case involved an alleged Facebook data breach of around 50 million users in the US to benefit Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
At the time, whistleblower Christopher Wylie told British lawmakers he “believed” the Congress party in India was a client of Cambridge Analytica at the regional level.
Cambridge Analytica’s Indian partner, Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI)—owned by the son of senior JD(U) leader K.C. Tyagi, Amrish Tyagi—listed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and Janata Dal (United) as its clients on its website. All parties denied having links with the company but accused the other of utilising its services.
However, a political slugfest had begun, with the BJP asking the Congress to apologise to the nation for trying to subvert India’s election process.
Meanwhile, in August 2020, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled ‘Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide with Indian Politics’ which made explosive revelations about the social media platform’s relationship with the ruling party in India.
The article quoted current and former employees who claimed “a broader pattern of favouritism by Facebook toward Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu hard-liners”. It even alleged that Facebook India’s policy chief, Ankhi Das, had opposed applying Facebook’s hate speech rules to BJP politicians on the platform.
The Wall Street Journal said Das told staff members that “punishing violations” by BJP politicians “would damage the company’s business prospects in the country, Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users”.
The article led to an immediate questioning of the role that a social media platform like Facebook plays in influencing and shaping user perceptions, especially during an election.
Opposition MPs demanded a probe into the social media giant’s conduct in India.
With a screenshot of the article, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi led the charge, and posted on X, “BJP & RSS control Facebook & WhatsApp in India. They spread fake news and hatred through it and use it to influence the electorate.”
He celebrated the fact that the American media had finally “come out with the truth about Facebook”.
In response, Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar reminded Gandhi of Cambridge Analytica, asking, “You were caught red-handed in alliance with Cambridge Analytica & Facebook to weaponise data before the elections & now have the gall to question us?”
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Safeguarding citizens’ rights
The fallout of the allegations in the Wall Street Journal article was almost immediate.
Two months after this article, Das, who had worked with Facebook since 2011, resigned. A statement by Ajit Mohan, Facebook India’s vice-president and managing director, said she has decided to step down from her role “to pursue her interest in public service”.
The Wall Street Journal article wasn’t the only attack on Facebook, questioning its relationship with the ruling government in India. Other international press also began writing about how “Facebook’s ties to India’s ruling party complicate its fight against hate speech”.
Within days, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, then headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, issued a notice requesting Meta’s Vice-President and Managing Director Ajit Mohan to appear before it on 2 September.
Issued on 20 August, 2020, the notice, seen by ThePrint, said the Parliamentary committee was seeking Meta’s views on the subject of “safeguarding citizens’ rights and prevention of misuse of social/online news media platforms including special emphasis on women security in the digital space”.
Mohan appeared before the committee. After the proceedings, Tharoor posted on social media platforms that the parties met for three and a half hours, and unanimously agreed to resume the discussion “later”.
In subsequent hearings in 2021, the panel reportedly urged Facebook, as well as other intermediaries to comply with the Information Technology Rules, and put in place safeguards to protect its users’ data.
In a February 2021 response to a question in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Sanjay Dhotre said the government had taken note of the Wall Street Journal report.
He acknowledged that the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology has written to the CEO, of Facebook about the alleged bias of the platform and that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology has already taken up the matter with Facebook.
As for Cambridge Analytica, it was only in 2021, that the Central Bureau of India (CBI) finally booked Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research Limited for fraudulently collecting and harvesting “unauthorised” data of 5.62 lakh Indian users on the Facebook application. This was more than two years after it launched a preliminary enquiry in July 2018.
AAP enters the Facebook duel ring
Over the years, every controversy involving Facebook in India has sparked a cycle of allegations and counter-allegations between parties, with each side accusing the other of using Facebook to further their agenda.
Even when The Wall Street Journal article directly insinuated bias towards the ruling party, Union Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote a strongly worded letter to Zuckerberg days after the article, accusing the platform of being biased against the ruling party.
Prasad launched a direct attack on Facebook’s higher management in India, asserting that the Facebook India team, including its managing director and other senior executives, were “dominated by people who belong to a particular political belief”.
Prasad alleged the Facebook India management had deleted pages and “reduced” the reach of “right-of-centre ideology” supporters before the 2019 general elections.
Meanwhile, on 10 September, 2020, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) also entered the Facebook duel.
The Delhi Assembly’s Peace and Harmony Committee, headed by AAP MLA Raghav Chadha, issued summons to Mohan, highlighting numerous complaints alleging intentional omission and deliberate inaction on the part of Facebook in tackling hate speech online.
Mohan was asked to appear on 15 September, 2020, before the Committee which was constituted in the wake of the 2020 Delhi communal riots.
While Mohan readily appeared before the Parliamentary panel days before the summons, he resisted appearing before the Delhi committee.
He even approached the Supreme Court, challenging the committee’s powers to summon him, asserting that regulation of intermediaries like Facebook squarely fell within the legislative domain of Parliament, and not the Delhi Assembly.
However, the Supreme Court rejected Mohan’s petition on 8 July, 2021, ruling that while the Committee was within its power to issue summons for appearance to Facebook, it could not recommend any action for prosecution against the people appearing before it.
Following the apex court win, the committee grilled Facebook’s Public Policy Director Shivnath Thukral, instead of Mohan, in November 2021. Unlike the Parliamentary panel proceedings, the Delhi Committee’s proceedings were livestreamed on YouTube.
The RSS-BJP-Facebook soup
In 2020, when Indian government panels were still looking at The Wall Street Journal allegations, new claims surfaced through whistleblower accounts.
In September 2020, a Facebook whistleblower claimed to have found evidence of coordinated campaigns to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes in various countries, including India.
In a 6,600-word memo, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang said that she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence” the 2020 Delhi elections.
Then, in 2021, Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s complaint to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cited an undated internal Facebook document titled “Adversarial Harmful Networks-India Case study”.
This report hurled a direct attack on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), saying that “RSS users, groups, and pages promote fear-mongering, anti-Muslim narratives targeted pro-Hindu populations with V&I (violence and inciting) content”.
“There were a number of dehumanising posts comparing Muslims to ‘pigs’ and ‘dogs’ and misinformation claiming the Quran calls for men to rape their female family members,” this report further noted.
However, it said that much of this content was never flagged or acted upon because of Facebook’s lack of Hindu and Bengali classifiers.
In response, Facebook told the media it used technology to proactively detect violating content in Hindi and Bengali, in addition to over 40 languages globally.
As recently as last year, The Guardian alleged that Meta approved several AI-manipulated political advertisements during the 2024 general elections. The reports alleged that these ads spread misinformation and incited communal violence.
‘Going by what the government demands’
Meanwhile, India has surpassed the US as the country with the highest number of Facebook users, now standing at over 490 million.
Apar Gupta emphasised the importance of viewing Facebook as a transnational corporation focused on its commercial operations and expansion, as well as generating revenue based on it from India rather than examining it from the personality of its founder, Zuckerberg, or by attributing political motives to its actions over the years.
He explained that a presence in India was of vital importance for the Meta platform with the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp given the number of people who access it, even though the revenue it derives from them is much lower than the EU or US.
As for the users, Gupta pointed out that for ordinary Indians with a smartphone, not having a Meta platform is seen as a large gap in their digital footprint and their ability to digitally communicate with people.
“To a large extent, Facebook is trying to maintain its market presence in India, which requires it in a country that has an imperfect rule of law system to also go by what the government demands over and above what the legal regulations demand from it,” he said.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
Also read: Meta replacing fact-checks with ‘untested’ community notes in US sparks fears of misinformation spike
