Meta, MeitY officers to depose earlier than panel

Senior executives from Meta are scheduled to depose earlier than the Standing Committee on Information Technology on Monday with respect to allegations of tampering of commercial charges for various political events, sources in know of the matter mentioned.

Apart from senior executives from Facebook and WhatsApp, each owned by Meta, senior officers from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) are additionally scheduled to seem earlier than the Standing Committee led by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, one of many sources mentioned.

The panel is prone to search MeitY officers’ views on the methods through which the web, particularly social media intermediaries, could be stored secure and trusted for kids and girls. It can also be prone to query Meta officers on the alleged discrepancies on commercial charges for political events.

The Standing Committee of Parliament on IT, led by Tharoor, contains 31 members, of which 21 are from the Lok Sabha, whereas the remaining are from the Rajya Sabha.

Last week, Congress president Sonia Gandhi requested the Centre to “put an end to the systematic interference of Facebook and other social media giants in the electoral politics of the world’s largest democracy”. “It has come to public notice repeatedly that global social media companies are not providing a level playing field to all political parties,” she had mentioned.

Referring to a report revealed in Al Jazeera and The Reporters’ Collective, which claimed Facebook had provided BJP cheaper offers “by bending their own hate speech rules” for election ads as in comparison with different political events and suppressed “the voice of all those who were speaking up against the government”, Gandhi had mentioned that such actions had been past “partisan politics” and that the democracy needed to be protected regardless of who was in energy.