Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday apologised to the government for temporary removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s July 23 exam reform video from Facebook and presence of child sexual abuse content in advertisements on Instagram.Speaking for Zuckerberg, Meta’s global affairs chief Joel Kaplan said he had “apologised to the Minister for Electronics and Information Technology (Ashwini Vaishnaw) on behalf of Meta for the error restricting PM Modi’s Facebook post”.Officials said Meta leaders Kaplan and Rafael Frankel, head, Asia Public Policy, who represented the firm at the meeting, admitted to failures on regulating child sexual abuse content and deepfakes, and acknowledged that a lot of money was paid for boosting a certain type of content.Meta representatives didn’t make any formal comments on the meeting or its proceedings.Earlier today, Meta executives also met Ministry Secretary S Krishnan for 45 minutes.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been in the eye of a storm since July 23 when a Facebook video of PM Modi disappeared from the platform for five hours in an error which the firm initially described as operational.Dissatisfied with the response, Vaishnaw summoned Meta’s global officials and the parliamentary committee for IT issued an ultimatum to the company to either apologise or lose safe harbour immunity under Section 79 (3) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.In today’s meetings, the government told Meta that it could not claim the status of a neutral “intermediary” under the IT Act as the company’s algorithms actively curated, recommended and determined which users received content, rather than merely hosting third-party material.“Meta will, therefore, not be entitled to safe harbour protections available to intermediaries, which shield platforms from liability for user-generated content subject to compliance with the law,” officials conveyed to Meta, which was also asked to explain the presence of child sexual abuse material in advertisements on the platform.“Meta’s position was also sought on deepfakes, protections for key verified accounts, algorithmic bias and compliance with Indian law. It admitted that a lot of illegal content was promoted and paid promotions were carried out for specific audiences,” official sources said, adding that Meta leaders would be called again.Importantly, ahead of today’s meetings, Parliamentary Standing Committee for IT, headed by BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, in a letter to Krishnan and Home Secretary Govind Mohan, asked the government to discontinue safe harbour protection to Meta if Zuckerberg didn’t offer an unconditional apology within three days.The committee had on August 3 convened a meeting with officials from the Ministries of Home Affairs and Electronics and Information Technology, and representatives of social media giants, including Snapchat, Google, X, Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) and YouTube, to discuss regulation of social and digital media platforms and their accountability under Indian law.During the meeting, the committee expressed serious concern over the availability of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and content demeaning women on Meta’s intermediary platforms.It recommended strict action against platforms that failed to remove such illegal content. The committee also said that if intermediaries did not promptly take down CSAM from their platforms, action should be initiated against them under Section 79(3) of the Information Technology Act, which governed the safe harbour protections available to intermediaries.