Tech giant Meta has apologized and said it has fixed an auto-translation issue that led one of its social media platforms to mistakenly announce the death of Siddaramaiah, chief minister of the Indian state of Karnataka.
Siddaramaiah had posted on Instagram in the local Kannada language, saying he was paying his respects to the late Indian actress B. Saroja Devi. He also paid tribute to the actress on Facebook and X. However, Meta鈥檚 auto-translation tool inaccurately translated the Instagram post to suggest that Siddaramaiah, who uses just one name, was the one who 鈥減assed away.鈥
鈥淐hief Minister Siddaramaiah passed away yesterday multilingual star, senior actress B. Took darshan of Sarojadevi鈥檚 earthly body and paid his last respects,鈥 the garbled translation read.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: 鈥淲e fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologize that this happened.鈥
Siddaramaiah criticized the auto-translation tool as 鈥渄angerous鈥 in posts on Facebook and X, adding that such 鈥渘egligence鈥 from tech giants 鈥渃an harm public understanding and trust.鈥 He urged Meta to 鈥渢emporarily suspend鈥 its auto-translation tool for content written in Kannada 鈥渦ntil the translation accuracy is reliably improved.鈥 His office also requested that Meta work with Kannada-language experts to improve the feature.
鈥淭his poses a significant risk, especially when public communications, official statements, or important messages from the Chief Minister and the Government are incorrectly translated,鈥 Siddaramaiah wrote. 鈥淚t can lead to misinterpretation among users, many of whom may not realize that what they are reading is an automated and faulty translation rather than the original message.鈥
CNN (7/18/25) By Amarachi Orie