'Broadly Worded': Supreme Court Quashes HC Order Asking Wikipedia to Remove Content on ANI

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has set aside the Delhi high court's order asking Wikipedia to take down content on the Asian News International news agency which it deemed defamatory.

The bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan, according to Bar and Bench, told ANI that it was free to move the single-judge bench of Delhi high court again for interim relief.

LiveLaw reported that the court said the high court's direction "to remove all false, misleading and defamatory content" was "very broadly worded" and not capable of being implemented.

The Delhi high court had on April 8 directed the Wikimedia Foundation to remove content that ANI had claimed was defamatory from Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be edited by its users.

On it, ANI had been called a “propaganda tool for the incumbent government.”

A bench of Justices Prathiba M. Singh and Rajneesh Kumar Gupta had cited the Narendra Modi government's IT Rules, under which intermediaries have an obligation to make efforts not to publish objectionable content.

The court had said that Wikipedia is regarded as an encyclopaedia and should maintain neutrality and "not take sides like a blog."

The same court had on April 2 given the same order, which Wikimedia had challenged in front of a larger bench.

ANI had sued Wikimedia claiming that the ANI page on Wikipedia had been locked from public editing, thus barring its own representatives from setting the records straight on their terms.

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