Takedown orders not issued by Meity: Govt official on restriction of social media posts

The ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) is not issuing takedown orders, a senior official at the ministry has said. Over the past couple of weeks, journalists, media organisations, cartoonists and political commentators have reported a run of restrictions on their posts, videos and accounts on Instagram, Facebook and X.India NewsAffected users have been told little. Platform notifications often say only that access has been restricted in India following a request from the government or law enforcement agencies. There is no consolidated data available on how many such restriction requests have been complied with companies.“We are not sending these takedowns. Ask Meta,” the senior official said.The remarks point to other routes by which such requests reach platforms, chief among them the Sahyog portal. The portal is run by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Union home ministry, and it relays requests from government agencies and police to online intermediaries. Its critics have long argued that it allows officers across the government to order content removed without the checks that govern formal blocking.Those checks belong to Section 69A of the IT Act, the only provision under which Meity issues blocking directions. The Supreme Court upheld Section 69A in its 2015 Shreya Singhal judgment because of the safeguards attached to it: orders must record reasons, the affected party must be given a hearing, and a review committee oversees the decisions.Sahyog notices travel by a different route. They are sent under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021. These provisions govern a platform’s safe-harbour protection from liability for user content, and its obligations over information allegedly being used to commit unlawful acts.X (formerly Twitter), which called Sahyog a “censorship portal” in its challenge in the Karnataka high court, argued that Section 79(3)(b) only sets out the circumstances in which a platform loses that shield and confers no power to block. According to X’s filings, officers from the home, defence, railways and finance ministries had been authorised to send notices through the portal, as had police in more than 30 states and Union territories, with each officer deciding for themselves what counted as unlawful.The government’s own submissions conceded at least one misuse. It admitted that an Indian Railways notice ordering X to remove a viral video of a woman driving on railway tracks in Telangana had exceeded the statutory powers, though Solicitor General Tushar Mehta called it an “isolated incident”.The Centre defended the portal as a “purely administrative” tool that “neither mandates removal nor imposes penalties”. The high court agreed. It dismissed X’s petition in September 2025, calling the portal “an instrument of public good”, and X has appealed.A month after that verdict, Meity amended Rule 3(1)(d) to address the criticism over who could send notices. Removal intimations can now be issued only by a joint secretary or equivalent officer at the Centre or in a state, by a director-level officer where no joint secretary post exists, or by a police officer of deputy inspector general (DIG) rank. A secretary-rank officer must review every intimation each month.Those safeguards were tested this month. On October 5, the Punjab and Haryana high court set aside an August 21 notice to Meta that had blocked the Facebook page of Haryana 24 News Network Private Limited. The court found that the notice was issued by an officer below DIG rank and that the mandatory monthly review had not been shown to have taken place.The court also ruled that users must receive a copy of a takedown intimation when it is sent to the platform, so that they can challenge the block. That requirement answers a gap critics had flagged in the Sahyog process.Mishi Choudhary, founder of SFLC.in and a technology lawyer, said, “India is witnessing an unprecedented volume of online takedowns. Platforms blame automated systems or government requests. Now if Government is not issuing these orders. So who is? Users cannot be expected to navigate this maze of denials simply to find out who censored their speech, on what grounds, and how to challenge it. This opacity makes accountability impossible. Transparency and accountability is the core of this issue.”In the last 29 days, SFLC.in’s Free Speech Tracker has recorded total 351 cases of content and account restrictions. Of these, 23 instances involved actions taken pursuant to legal requests under Section 79(3)(b), while 11 involved requests under Rule 4(4) of the IT Rules, 2021.In the last one month, SFLC’s RightsLine, pro bono digital rights helpline, has also received 28 cases of content restrictions.Apar Gupta, founder of digital rights advocacy Internet Freedom Foundation, said: “MeitY has made censorship so efficient it no longer even needs to issue a specific order. The IT Rules, 2021 and its advisories have Meta doing the job for it. In the past month alone, we have received 67 requests for pro bono help from Instagram users facing account and content restrictions. The largest share concern takedowns citing the IT Rules, 2021. Apparently, this is what the government means by ease of doing business.”Meta did not respond to HT till the time of going to print.