H
yderabad's cybercrime police booked Meta India head Arun Srinivas on Friday, naming him alongside roughly twenty Facebook and Instagram accounts in cases over videos and images targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The FIRs, filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the IT Act, followed complaints that AI-generated and digitally altered content mocking the Prime Minister had been circulating on Meta's platforms for days.
Two men brought the complaints: S. Aravind Reddy, described in reports as a businessman, and T. Saikiran Goud, a BJP activist from Telangana. Both said they'd come across the material while scrolling Instagram clips and images they called obscene, derogatory and clearly manipulated, some stitched together with abusive captions designed to travel further than an ordinary post would. Police are now working through the digital trail on both fronts: who made the content, and who let it spread.
The videos trace back to the Cockroach Janta Party's protest over the NEET paper-leak controversy a demonstration that ran for 36 days out of Delhi's Jantar Mantar and pulled in students from across the country.
Somewhere in that churn, the anti-establishment energy curdled into a flood of morphed Modi content on Facebook and Instagram, enough of it that Hyderabad police now say it risked misleading the public and stirring unrest. Naming Srinivas isn't an allegation that he made or posted anything himself investigators have been clear about that but it puts Meta's India leadership squarely inside a probe into what the platform allowed to circulate.
That FIR lands on top of a separate, messier episode the company was already trying to explain away. On July 23, Modi posted a Facebook video aimed at Gen Z, promising tough action against paper leaks. Five days later, in the early hours of July 28, Meta took the post down. It came back up hours later, with the company blaming a technical glitch and apologising.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT wasn't having it. Officials called the removal "extremely disturbing" and told Meta its explanation didn't hold up pointed language for what the company had framed as routine platform housekeeping. A senior Meta executive was hauled in soon after to account for it in person.
Under pressure, Meta wrote to the government laying out new guardrails. Posts from the Prime Minister and other high-profile accounts will now go through extra layers of review, and any decision to remove or restrict such content needs sign-off from at least two senior company officials before it happens. It's the kind of fix that reads as an admission that the old process wasn't built for how much scrutiny a single post from Modi's account can draw.
None of that satisfied MeitY. By Friday, the ministry had escalated things further, summoning Meta's global team not just the India office to answer for how its recommendation algorithm actually works and what role it plays in maintaining public order. That team is also expected to appear before a parliamentary panel, with a hearing reportedly on the calendar for August 3. MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan didn't soften the message, telling reporters that Mark Zuckerberg's company "has no business taking down" the Prime Minister's post.
Meta, for its part, has said senior executives plan to travel to India this week or early next to meet officials directly an attempt, it seems, to get ahead of a story that keeps generating new fronts faster than the company can close them.
The episode hasn't stayed purely regulatory for long. Saikiran Goud, one of the two complainants in the Hyderabad case, has already gone public claiming opposition parties are funding social media accounts to target the Prime Minister an accusation that's likely to keep the FIR story alive in TV debates regardless of where the police investigation actually lands. Whether that claim holds up is a separate question from whether Meta's moderation systems failed; for now, both are being litigated in the same news cycle.
What happens next depends on two tracks moving in parallel a criminal investigation in Hyderabad that's still at an early stage, and a political reckoning in Delhi where a five-day-old apology has turned into a summons for Meta's top brass. Neither looks close to wrapping up.
