India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has summoned Meta’s global public policy leadership after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Facebook video addressing young people was briefly removed from the platform and later restored.
According to multiple reports citing government and company sources, the video was posted on July 23 on Modi’s official Facebook account as a selfie-style address to youth during nationwide student protests over alleged examination irregularities, including issues linked to the NEET test. During the early hours of July 28, users in India found the post temporarily unavailable, with some reports indicating that a message suggested the content was restricted in the country following a legal request.
Meta has since restored the video and apologised, telling Indian authorities and media that the content was taken down “in error” due to what has been described as a technical glitch. “The content was removed in error and has since been restored,” a Meta spokesperson said, in a statement echoed across several outlets. The company has stressed that the removal was not intentional and that it acted quickly once the issue was identified.
The ministry’s decision to summon Meta’s global head of public policy, and in some accounts also Instagram’s global leadership, marks an escalation from earlier expectations that only India-based executives would be called to explain the incident. Officials are understood to be examining the sequence of events, including how a post from the Prime Minister’s official account was selected for restriction, what process was triggered, and why safeguards did not prevent the takedown.
Sources quoted by Indian media say the government is treating the matter as serious and is likely to seek detailed explanations from Meta representatives on the technical cause of the error and steps being taken to prevent similar incidents.
The summons come amid broader scrutiny of how major social platforms handle political, protest-related and youth-focused content during periods of public unrest. While Meta has characterised the removal of Modi’s video as a one-off mistake, the government’s engagement with the company’s global leadership suggests that wider questions around content moderation, legal request handling and recommendation systems in India may be on the agenda.
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