The Supreme Court has asked the information and broadcasting ministry to prepare a draft mechanism for screening user-generated content prior to its uploading on social media. The highest court’s concern is not without basis. Hoaxes on social media have triggered transgressions ranging from lynchings to riots. Social media platforms have repeatedly shown that their content moderation systems remain slow: complaints are not acted upon with urgency. Age-verification rules are barely enforced, and violent or sexual content often slips past filters. As for concerns of censorship, the judges on the bench that issued the order iterated that they want a “sieve” rather than a “gag”, a preventive filter that would stop inflammatory misinformation before it ricochets around the corners of the country or even the world. They have stressed that criticism of the government is a democratic right and that no system should silence political dissent, and insisted that the proposed body must be autonomous.

In principle, a structured guardrail that protects citizens from genuinely dangerous falsehoods, deepfakes and manipulative propaganda could be useful. The judicial urgency is, therefore, welcome. But the question is whether governments of the day, in India and around the world, would end up weaponising such a mechanism to target dissent. India’s recent history of online censorship gives cause for concern. YouTube was asked to block international media content on, say, the prime minister at the government’s request; Indian journalists critical of the government have found their videos quietly demonetised; and influencers censorious of the party in power at the Centre have been restricted under sections of the Information Technology Act. The term, ‘anti-national’ — even the apex court has used this expression in relation to content it thinks should be filtered — has, in recent times, been used to throttle satire and academic debate alike. Given this track record, offering the State even a toehold in an apparatus aimed at facilitating pre-uploaded scrutiny can be perilous: a preventive mechanism can easily become a pretext for a crackdown on the right to freedom of speech and expression. The court may, quite rightly, be in favour of a structure that has agency. But unless the design of the mechanism ensures genuine independence, embeds transparent procedures, and enhances the scope of constitutional protections, it will remain vulnerable to political capture. India needs a framework that tackles harmful misinformation while protecting the right to scrutinise power. This is not a balance that is impossible to achieve.