For roughly five hours before dawn on 28 July, the most visible man in Indian public life did not exist on Facebook. A selfie video Narendra Modi had posted on 23 July, which was a direct pitch to Gen Z over the NEET-UG paper-leak fiasco that had kept students at Jantar Mantar for the better part of five weeks, went dark around half past midnight and did not return until about five in the morning.
Meta called it an error and restored the clip. The government did not buy it, and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology decided this was nothing less than an attack on democratic institutions.
That verdict now sits atop a far longer charge sheet: child sexual abuse material (CSAM) surfacing through Instagram's ad plumbing, unlabelled AI-generated imagery, and a wave of morphed, derogatory deepfakes targeting the Prime Minister, women and children, one of which has already produced an FIR from the Telangana Police.
Meta's global team was summoned. Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan apologised to IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw for the "error restricting PM Modi's post," and by 5 August, government sources were briefing that Mark Zuckerberg himself had conveyed regret for the CSAM lapses, the deepfakes and the operational failure.
The committee's price for peace was blunt: a personal apology from Zuckerberg within three days, or it would recommend stripping Meta of safe harbour.