The issues were discussed during a second consecutive meeting on Thursday chaired by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw with a contingent of Meta’s policy and regulatory officials, including Joel Kaplan, the company’s global affairs chief, and Neil Potts, vice president of public policy at the company.
The meeting is understood to have largely focused on algorithms of platforms like Instagram and Facebook, pushing the company to increase its cooperation with Indian law enforcement agencies, particularly on issues of child sexual abuse material and fraudulent content, and a broad assessment of Meta’s compliance with local laws.
The government has sought a detailed look into how algorithms deployed by Meta-owned platforms like Instagram and Facebook work, and a meeting has been scheduled for Friday, where a technical team from the company will make a presentation on how its algorithms work.
Since the students’ protest last month, which found significant traction among young users on Instagram, the government has focused on intensifying scrutiny of social media companies’ algorithms. The largely held belief is that these algorithms are somehow promoting anti-establishment voices more than pro-government ones. Platforms like Instagram and YouTube are particularly under the scanner.
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“In our research, we have found that a lot of content on platforms like Instagram is first boosted inorganically by bots, after which it attains virality and starts surfacing on people’s timelines organically. We want to look at how accounts on Meta platforms are created, how the company ensures that the account belongs to a human, and the parameters that go into deciding what content receives a boost from their algorithms,” a senior government official said, on condition of anonymity.
Queries sent to Meta remained unanswered until publication.
The government is said to have told Meta executives that the company needs to double down on the Indian market, and consider the diversity of the country, and its various languages, in content-related decisions it makes.
During the meeting, Kaplan is understood to have told minister Vaishnaw that Meta has created a dedicated internal group within the company to identify, discuss, and resolve India-related issues, and to further coordinate with the government.
The government is also learnt to have flagged its long-standing concern that American social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram do not directly report instances of child sexual abuse material to Indian law enforcement agencies, and instead report those to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). A similar concern was also raised by lawmakers in a meeting chaired by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology with social media companies on August 3.
On Wednesday, Kaplan had reiterated Meta’s apology over the brief takedown of a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the first meeting with minister Vaishnaw. Meta said that the video’s removal was an inadvertent error, and it was strengthening its internal checks and balances.
