Government to raise CSAM lapses, wrongful account action issue with Meta; global team in India on Aug 5-6

Published 4 August 2026 · politics

Lapses in curbing CSAM, as well as wrongful action on prominent accounts, are among a slew of concerns that the Government will raise when it

Lapses in curbing CSAM, as well as wrongful action on prominent accounts, are among a slew of concerns that the Government will raise when it meets Meta's global team, IT Secretary S. Krishnan said on Tuesday (August 4, 2026), adding that a company at the forefront of technology should have been able to make its systems work as they are supposed to. Meta's global team will be in India on August 5 and 6, Mr. Krishnan said. The upcoming meeting is significant as the government has summoned Meta's top global executives after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent Facebook post addressing Indian youth and promising stringent action against paper leaks was briefly restricted on the platform. Sources said top Meta executive Joel Kaplan is expected to be present at the meeting. While the U.S.-headquartered social media giant had attributed the incident to a technical glitch and apologised, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had found the explanation "inadequate". The company, which owns Facebook, had said that the content was removed "in error" and was restored on the platform. Meta has also been under regulatory scrutiny over the issue of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in paid on Instagram, and the government last month, slapped a notice on Meta over the issue.

"There are a range of issues the CSAM issue was raised, so what measures have been taken regarding that, and to what extent is synthetically generated information being looked at. Then, for prominent personalities when they have verified accounts, if content has to be taken down, there have to be safeguards; all of these will be the issues [taken up]," Mr. Krishnan told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of an independent multimodal AI evaluation platform by AI4Bharat at IIT Madras and Josh Talks AI. Meta, as one of the leading technology companies in the world, should have the technology to address such issues effectively, he said. "We would like to understand from them [Meta] as to why some of these things have not been working the way they are supposed to work, and what the challenges are," Mr. Krishnan added. For platforms, there needs to be a clear understanding of India's law, what compliance must look like, "and a clearer understanding of how they intend to make sure compliance happens", Mr. Krishnan said. Government sources had earlier said that the issue is not just about technical aspects, but about "national security and public order". Meta's global team will be "categorically" asked to clarify issues around algorithmic bias, how their algorithm operates and the company's role in public order, they had said.