India's Minister for Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw on Monday (Jan 13) called out Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for making an inaccurate claim about India’s 2024 elections.
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Zuckerberg had said in a podcast with Joe Rogan that incumbent governments in all countries, including India, lost elections in 2024. The minister called the comments "disappointing" and accused the tech billionaire of spreading misinformation.
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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won India’s 2024 general election, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi securing a third consecutive term in office. However, Zuckerberg said during the podcast that this was not the case.
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He said, "2024 was a big election year around the world. All these countries, like India, had elections. The incumbents basically lost every single one. There is some sort of a global phenomenon – whether it was because of inflation or the economic policies to deal with Covid or just how the governments dealt with Covid - seems to have had this global effect...There was a broad decrease in trust in incumbents and maybe in these sorts of democratic institutions overall."
In response, Vaishnaw said, "As the world’s largest democracy, India conducted the 2024 elections with over 640 million voters. The people of India reaffirmed their trust in the NDA led by PM Narendra Modi's leadership. Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that most...
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