A government addicted to narrative control is expanding its censorship powers and bending existing laws to do so. It is also amending digital rules in the existing Information Technology Act, 2000 and giving them expanded legal powers. It has permitted the Union ministryof home affairs to create a portal which can authorise takedowns from social media platforms, a power earlier vested only in the ministry of information and broadcasting and the ministryof electronics and informationtechnology. That portal authorises a wide range of government personnel, including the police, to order takedowns from online platforms. All this under the noses of the media, the courts and Parliament.
Internet intermediaries and social media platforms in India are up against censorship that has become increasingly pervasive. The scope of free speech and publicly available information in the digital age is shrinking rapidly, despite the existence of multiple platforms. Last week, The Hindu reported that India is among the countries where Meta automatically blocks flagged content, even as takedown notices come thick and fast from the Centre and the state police. But how many pieces of content it has blocked is something the platform says it will only reveal later in the year.
Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has responded very differently, going to the Karnataka High Court in March last year to file a writ petition, challenging the Union government’s creation and use of the Sahyog Portal under the ministry of home affairs, a centralised digital mechanism that enables government agencies at various levels to directly issue content-blocking orders. As the petition put it, Sahyog creates a parallel mechanism to issue blocking orders without adhering to the procedural safeguards prescribed under Section 69A of the IT Act. Back in March 2015, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark verdict on online free speech. In Shreya Singhal versus Union of India, it struck down Section 66A of the IT Act which criminalised social media posts. Instead, it upheld blocking power under Section 69A, which it said came with adequate safeguards.
The other significant part of that ruling was that the court strengthened the safe harbour provision under Section 79 of the IT Act which protects platforms from liability for what users say online. But, subsequently, successive amendments in 2021 — the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 — to the IT Act have diluted the safe harbour provision of this Section.
In its 2025 petition before the Karnataka High Court, X Corp.’s argument was statutory: it contended that Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act — the clause stripping immunity if an intermediary fails to act — was never meant to be an independent censorship tool. Only Section 69A (with its procedural Rules) confers authority to block public access to content, and any deviation would thwart Shreya Singhal’s safeguards. Control over online speech has now shifted from the judiciary to the executive.
But in September 2025, the Karnataka High Court upheld the government’s authority under the IT Act to expand censorship via Sahyog. It said platforms operating in India “must accept that liberty is yoked with responsibility”, particularly in cases involving offences against women. The court maintained that social media required regulation and rejected X Corp.’s challenge. The company said it would appeal the verdict.
In the meantime, internet activists have pointed out that the home ministry’s Sahyog portal functions without Parliamentary sanction. Thirty-three states, seven Central agencies, and 72 companies are onboarded. Suffocation of expression is entrusted to government agencies.
X Corp. told the Karnataka High Court that it received 29,118 requests for takedowns in the first half of 2025, roughly 160 a day. Since February 2021, four expansions of the IT Rules have centralised executive power over what Indians may say, see, and share online. But the ministry of home affairs, on its part, told the Gujarat High Court that X was guilty of persistent noncompliance. Of 94 takedown notices in 3 years, X responded to only 13. The amendments to IT Rules in Feb 2026 compressed the time given to comply with blocking orders from 36 hours to 3 hours.
The most recent draft of the amended IT Rules, circulated on March 30, 2026, widens the net from news platforms to ordinary social media users who comment on news and current affairs, a move that plainly responds to the rise of independent commentators channelling citizen anger at public officials across the ideological spectrum. It also proposes to make informal communication, such as advisories, clarifications, and codes of practice, legally binding on platforms, activists say. These are described as ‘soft laws’.
The researcher, Srinivas Kodali, says that the Sahyog Portal has speed, scope and scale. It is unconstitutional. Even a constable can issue orders for takedowns. There is a coordinated networking on censorship across departments,including policing agencies, and even across states. A user who is posting something from Hyderabad about Assam will get notices from both Assam and Hyderabad police, he adds.
But why does a self-assured government feel the need to do endless narrative control? Why this tireless quest to enable even more censoring?
There is no public data on the nature of requests that come from Sahyog. RTIs are not being responded to. There is no publicly available data from the platforms either that detail the takedowns. As the government amends rules in existing laws and then experiments with treating the new rules as laws, a whole range of social media platforms find themselves either scrambling to comply or turning to the courts.
On another free speech front, petitions challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act are now before the Supreme Court. The apex court is set to examine five petitions challenging the constitutionality of the DPDP Act, 2023 — its rules were notified in 2025 — and crucial amendments to the RTI Act, 2005 necessitated as a direct result of the former. These petitions argue that a law meant to protect digital personal information introduces a “chilling effect” on the free press and could strike a “death knell” for the right to seek government accountability. The petitions maintain that the new law dilutes provisions of the more than two-decade-old RTI Act and limits the freedom of the press by requiring journalists to seek permission from those whose actions they wish to expose. Because at its core, the DPDP Act raises a conflict between two fundamental rights: the right to privacy and the right to information.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the labour newsletter, Worker Web.