New Delhi: Nearly a third of the 66 takedown notices, or about 30%, sent to X (formerly Twitter) by home ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) in the past year have been to warn the platform regarding content about Union ministers and Union government agencies, The Hindu reported.
The biggest chunk of warnings has been on posts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, home minister Amit Shah, his son and Indian Cricket Council (ICC) chairman Jay Shah, minister of state for home affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, according to court records obtained by The Hindu from the Delhi High Court and the Karnataka High Court.
X is not alone in this battle. Over the past year, the Modi government has also sent notices to other social media and messaging intermediaries, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reportedly targeting over 1.1 lakh pieces of content for the “removal of unlawful information”.
The content fell under categories such as deepfakes, child sexual abuse material, financial frauds and “misleading and false information”, received for posts by political parties, news outlets and individual users in India and around the world.
Notably, X Corp, the company behind the Elon Musk-led platform, had filed a petition in Karnataka high court challenging the use of Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, for content removal. It also requested protection for not using SAHYOG, an I4C portal, for managing Section 79(3)(b) orders that X called a “censorship portal.”
However, during the hearing, according to a Hindustan Times report, the Union government told the court that X has no legal right to challenge the removal of user content and that any resistance to takedown orders could result in the platform losing its immunity from legal consequences under Indian law.
The Union government further insisted that notices under this Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act were not blocking orders in and of themselves but instead warned social media firms that they would share liability with users if the notified posts are ever challenged in court.
