The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to examine the Aam Aadmi Party’s petition challenging the suspension of its Gujarat unit’s Instagram and Facebook accounts by parent company Meta at the alleged instance of the Centre.
The AAP alleged that the action was “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional”.
A bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe, however, tagged the matter with another petition filed earlier by an organisation named Software Freedom Law Centre challenging the power of the government to block or suspend social media accounts without prior notice to the affected parties. The organisation’s petition is
pending before a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant.
In the case filed by the AAP, the party has challenged the April 25 order of Meta to suspend its Instagram and Facebook accounts under Section 79(3b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, under which the government can give directions to the intermediaries to suspend or block social media accounts if they are found to have been used to spread objectionable materials.
According to the section, the intermediaries will be liable for penal action if “upon receiving actual knowledge, or on being notified by the appropriate Government or its agency that any information, data or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource, controlled by the intermediary is being used to commit the unlawful act, the intermediary fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material on that resource without vitiating the evidence in any manner”.
The AAP’s accounts were stated to have been suspended over alleged copyright violations relating to the unauthorised use of clips from Gujarati films during the campaign for the local body polls in the state.