The Supreme Court on Monday sought responses from the Centre and OTT and social media platforms on a plea to curb unregulated “obscene, objectionable and indecent” content.

A bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and George Augustine Masih issued notices to the Union government, Netflix, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon Prime, ALTT, ULLU Digital and MUBI on a PIL filed by former information commissioner Uday Mahurkar.

Solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, agreed with Mahurkar’s counsel that some of the content on OTT platforms was “obscene and deviant”. Mehta said the Centre had already brought in some regulations and more were in the offing, but did not elaborate.

“Sometimes it becomes difficult for even two respectable men to sit together to watch these programmes. We already have some regulations in force and we are contemplating some more measures,” Mehta said.

Mehta told the court that the Centre was “not treating the issue as adversarial”, meaning the government was not disputing the concerns raised in the petition.

“This petition raises an important concern with regard to the display of various objectionable, obscene and indecent content on OTT platforms and social media. Learned solicitor-general says that the present plea shall not be taken in an adversarial way. It is submitted that some of the content is perverse. Learned solicitor-general further submits that some regulations are in existence and some are being contemplated. Thus, we issue notices to the respondents,” the apex court said.

Justice Gavai, heading the bench, observed that any regulation would have to be introduced by the legislature and the executive as the courts were often being criticised for their perceived “overreach”.

Advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain, the petitioner’s counsel, told the bench that the petitioner had appended several crucial materials, including specific instances of these OTT platforms using unrestricted sexually explicit material.

According to the petitioner, the content telecast by these platforms was “sexually deviant material which polluted the minds of young children and even grown-ups, giving rise to perverted and unnatural sexual tendencies” and leading to rising crimes against women and minors.