Ammon News - 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 Indian politician Siddaramaiah.

The chief minister of the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka posted on Instagram Tuesday 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’s auto-translation tool inaccurately translated the Instagram post to suggest that Siddaramaiah, who uses just one name, was the one who “passed away.”

“Chief Minister Siddaramaiah passed away yesterday multilingual star, senior actress B. Took darshan of Sarojadevi’s earthly body and paid his last respects,” the erroneous, garbled translation read, CNN affiliate News 18 reported.

A Meta spokesperson told news agency Press Trust of India Thursday: “We fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologize that this happened.”

CNN