130 censorship orders issued via Home's Sahyog portal in 5 months

Indian Express

21-04-2025

The number received through the RTI do not reflect the notices sent to Elon Musk-owned X under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act. Social media platform X is yet to join the Sahyog portal, which was launched last year to expedite the process of sending notices. X has, in fact, sued the government over this, calling it a 'censorship' portal.
A separate RTI application filed by this paper also showed that in just two months January-February 2025, the IT Ministry had issued 785 blocking orders to various online intermediaries through the use of Section 69(A) of the IT Act.
As per Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, online intermediaries like X can lose their safe harbour protections if they fail to block access to content which has been flagged by an 'appropriate' government agency. Safe harbour protections afford social media platforms legal immunity from hosting user generated content. While orders under this provision can be sent for various reasons, Section 69(A) orders can be sent for only a limited set of national security and public order-related offences.
Together, these two separate provisions highlight the parallel content blocking regimes the Central government, along with states and Union Territories, are relying on to direct online companies to take down content the governments find objectionable from their platforms.
While only the Centre can issue take down notices through Section 69(A), state governments and UTs, along with the Centre, are doing so through Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act. Companies like Meta, X and Google risk losing their legal immunity from third-party content if they fail to take down the links flagged in these blocking orders.
While the IT Ministry had directed a number of ministries to designate a nodal officer for issuing notices under Section 79(3)(b), ahead of notifying the IT Rules in February 2021, experts said the use of the provision to issue content blocking orders had picked up significantly in the last two years.
The ministries of Home and IT did not respond to a request for comment until publication.
This parallel regime is also at the heart of X's petition against the government, which has contended that through the use of Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, multiple government departments and agencies are now issuing content takedown notices to social media companies, 'attempting to bypass the multiple procedural safeguards' prescribed under Section 69A of the Act – while the latter has some guardrails, such as review committee meetings, the former has no such safeguards.
The Home Ministry, in response to the RTI application, said that till now, 65 online intermediaries have been onboarded to the Sahyog portal. Nodal officers from 33 states and Union Territories, along with representatives from seven Central agencies, have also been onboarded. The Central agencies include the I4C, Ministry of Defence, the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI), Ministry of Heavy Industries, Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND), Ministry of Rural Development, and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
While the number of blocking orders issued through the Sahyog portal are 130, one such order could contain multiple links that platforms are expected to act on. For example, as per information shared by the government in the ongoing case against X, it said that between March 20, 2024, and March 20, 2025, the I4C sent online companies, including WhatsApp, Instagram, X, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Skype, a total of 426 notices under Section 79(3)(b) which included blocking directions for more than 1 lakh pieces of content, ranging from deepfakes and obscenity to influencing the electoral process. Not all of these notices were sent through the Sahyog portal, since it came into being only in October 2024, as a central repository of such notices issued by the various authorised government stakeholders.
In its challenge against the Sahyog portal, X has also sought protection for its representatives and employees against coercive action for not joining Sahyog, a Ministry of Home Affairs portal, which it alleged, was a 'Censorship Portal'. The next date of hearing in the case is April 24.
The two content blocking regimes have varied levels of safeguards. While experts say both are far from ideal, under Section 69(A) orders, companies get an opportunity of hearing, the limit of blocking is limited to national security and public order related reasons, and companies receive a reasoned, albeit publicly confidential order. Under Section 79(3)(b) blocking orders, these safeguards are absent.