The Facebook board member who made controversial comments about India has stopped tweeting

REUTERS/Phil McCarten

Marc Andreessen, the Facebook board member and prominent venture capitalist who last week found himself in hot water after making controversial comments about India on Twitter, has fallen silent on the social network.

The last tweets that Andreessen sent were on February 10.

In a series of messages that day, he apologized for comments he had made the night before about colonialism in India, and said that he was "a huge admirer of the nation of India and the Indian people, who have been nothing but kind and generous to me for many years."

The absence of Andreessen's tweets has not gone unnoticed — he's usually very active on the social network. He has nearly 500,000 followers and he's tweeted almost 90,000 times.

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/700462210519322624
It’s been a week since @pmarca tweeted.

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/700679772918054912
Twitter doesn't feel like @twitter without @pmarca #comeback

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/700316604668735488
I miss @pmarca

He's not on a total break from Twitter, however. He's still "liking" tweets, and there's even a Twitter account that retweets messages he's liked.

The dust-up that seems to have prompted Andreessen's Twitter break occurred last week while Andreessen was having a discussion on Twitter about the Indian government's blocking of Free Basics, a Facebook service that provides some free internet services. Free Basics is meant for people who have never had access to the Internet before. But the Indian government ruled that it violated the concept of net neutrality, which says that all internet traffic must be treated equally.

Andreessen didn't agree with the ruling, and wrote in a Twitter reply to his colleague Benedict Evans, and Vikram Chachra, another entrepreneur and VC, that "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?"

REUTERS/Phil McCarten Facebook, where Andreessen is a board member, issued a statement distancing itself from his comments. Mark Zuckerberg also wrote on his own Facebook page that he "found the comments deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all."

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