The Central Government has held its firmest line yet against Meta, extracting a formal apology from the company’s top leadership over failures involving child sexual abuse material, deepfake content and the temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Facebook post. The reckoning played out during a high-level meeting in Delhi on August 5, where Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan met Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan, and where, according to government sources, the company acknowledged that its existing systems remain unable to fully control the volume of illegal content circulating on its platforms.
An Apology That Went Beyond the Modi Post
Kaplan’s visit was initially framed around explaining why Modi’s Facebook post, addressing India’s youth on paper leak enforcement, had been briefly restricted before being restored. Kaplan told reporters after the meeting that he had apologised to the minister on behalf of Meta for the error that led to the post’s restriction. But the discussions did not stop there.
According to sources familiar with the meeting, Meta went considerably further, with the company acknowledging that a substantial volume of illegal content had received paid promotion targeted at specific audiences on its platforms, and that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had separately sent his own apology to the government specifically addressing CSAM, deepfake content and broader operational failures. Officials indicated Meta would be summoned again over these concerns, suggesting the August 5 meeting marks the beginning of continued scrutiny rather than its conclusion.
Admissions on CSAM and Algorithmic Amplification
The meeting’s most consequential exchanges centred on child sexual abuse material and deepfakes, both of which had prompted a separate government notice to Meta over advertisements on Instagram in the preceding month. Meta officials reportedly conceded that detecting and removing such content in a timely manner remains a significant technical challenge, and that current systems are not yet fully equipped to monitor and eliminate the scale of illegal content appearing across the platform.
Vaishnaw reportedly pressed the delegation on a more pointed question, whether Meta’s own algorithms or advertising systems had actively promoted content capable of stoking public unrest, and whether financial incentives from paid promotion had contributed to amplifying specific categories of harmful material. That the company acknowledged accepting payment to boost content later identified as improperly moderated, including advertisements linked to CSAM on Instagram, represents an unusually direct admission for a platform of Meta’s scale.
A Legal Line in the Sand Over Safe Harbour
Perhaps the most consequential development to emerge from the meeting concerns Meta’s legal standing under Indian law rather than any single content failure. Government sources indicated that officials told the Meta delegation directly that the company no longer fits the legal definition of a passive intermediary, arguing that because Meta actively curates, prioritises and selects which content reaches which users, it functions more as a publisher than a neutral host. On that basis, authorities reportedly warned that Meta may not be entitled to rely on the Safe Harbour protection available under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, a provision that has historically shielded platforms from liability for user-generated content they do not directly create.
Should that position be formally pursued, it would mark a significant shift in how Indian regulators treat algorithmically curated platforms, moving away from treating them as neutral conduits and toward holding them accountable in a manner closer to traditional publishers. The government has been careful to frame this not as an isolated dispute over one post, but as part of a broader position that platforms operating at Meta’s scale in India must meet a correspondingly higher standard of accountability, one that written policies alone cannot satisfy without consistent, timely enforcement behind them.
The August 5 meeting adds to a long history of public reckonings for Meta and Zuckerberg specifically, from the 2014 controversy over undisclosed psychological experiments on users, through the 2016-2017 fake news and political influence scandals, to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data privacy fallout. What distinguishes this episode is the venue, a direct confrontation with the government of one of Meta’s largest and fastest-growing markets, and the government’s explicit signal that future accountability may extend beyond apologies into the legal architecture governing how the company operates in India altogether.
