India’s Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday warned against any abuse of social media in elections, following reports that a British consultancy improperly accessed information on millions of Facebook users to target US voters.
India is due to hold a national election in 2019 and there are several states electing new Assemblies in 2018 and the next.
Any attempt by the social media, including Facebook, of trying to influence India’s electoral process, will not be tolerated, said Prasad while addressing the media in New Delhi.
He said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be summoned to India if Facebook was found to have compromised the data of Indians.
Cambridge Analytica has denied media accusations and said it had deleted the data after learning the information did not adhere to data protection rules.
Facebook has said it has tightened its controls on such practices since it discovered the alleged abuses by Cambridge Analytica in 2015, but the issue has continued to rock the companies involved, as well as some political parties across the world.
