March to July, Government sent one blocking order to social media firms every minute

One blocking order, on an average, every 68 seconds. Around 1,275 every day. Nearly 1.95 lakh in just five months. That was the surge in state-backed directions seeking to restrict online content sent to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July this year, according to data accessed by The Indian Express. Significantly, this period included the students’ protests against exam leaks at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, which began in early June and was called off on July 25 following the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. To put this sharp rise in perspective, RTI records obtained by The Indian Express last year showed that between October 2024 and October 2025, a total of 2,312 blocking orders were sent to 19 online platforms through the Sahyog portal, translating to a daily average of six such orders a day. While the monthly break-up isn’t available, a senior government official said that a “considerable share” of the blocking orders were issued during the protests as they gathered momentum, particularly on Instagram. Not surprisingly, of the three platforms, Instagram accounted for the largest share of these government directions, receiving nearly 1 lakh blocking orders during the five-month period — just over half of the total. Facebook, which has seen a slowdown in user growth worldwide, received around 80,000 orders, while YouTube received nearly 15,000. Altogether, Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram received roughly nine out of every 10 orders issued to the three companies. These figures count blocking orders, each of which can cover hundreds of individual pieces of content or accounts, a majority of which have been issued through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal – a platform developed to send blocking notices — by various Central and state agencies. According to the Home Ministry’s 2024-25 annual report, a little over 1.11 lakh pieces of “suspicious online content” were blocked until March 2025 under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology (IT) Act, including through the Sahyog portal, in the whole year. The scale of the blocking orders is only one part of the story; the other is Meta’s response. The Indian Express has learnt that, in order to comply with the government-mandated three-hour takedown timeline, Meta has integrated its API (Application Programming Interface) with the Sahyog portal, allowing content flagged through government directions uploaded on the system to be automatically taken down from its platforms, without a separate human review by the company. This automation eliminates the room for Meta to review or contest any of these content take-down directives before it complies with them. The censorship drive on Instagram, as per information shared by users on social media, appeared to target several posts supporting the students’ protests, criticism of the government’s ethanol fuel blending policy, and content related to West Bengal Assembly elections, apart from deepfakes, among other things. Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal said some of his Instagram posts were blocked in India. Digital rights activists say that the automated takedown mechanism being adopted by Meta is fraught given that companies are legally required to takedown content only upon receiving what’s called “actual knowledge” of a lawful order. “An API that executes takedowns automatically has no knowledge at all. Nobody at Meta reads the order. Nobody checks whether it comes from an officer of the prescribed rank or states the reasons the amended rule now requires… Machine-to-machine execution converts a conditional legal duty into an unconditional compliance,” said Apar Gupta, advocate and founder director of the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation. Many of these orders are issued through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal - which all three social media companies have joined - under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, 2000. As per the provision, platforms are required to take down posts deemed unlawful by various government and law enforcement agencies to maintain the legal immunity they enjoy from user-generated content. These takedown orders, however, are in addition to those issued by the government under Section 69(A) of the IT Act, which is invoked to issue online censorship directives but is largely limited to offences related to national security and public order. India has over 600 million social media users, and estimates peg daily content posted to social media platforms in the country anywhere between 10 million to 100 million posts, in what is the world's biggest user base market for top tech companies. However, the volume of posts on social media may not necessarily always be proportional to takedown notices from governments. For instance, as per Meta's latest transparency report, between July-December 2025, the company took down more than 23 million pieces of content in Indonesia, which has less than a third of India's user base. In the same period, the company took down more than 41,000 pieces of content in India, though the count more than doubled from the 28,000 pieces of content the platform had blocked between January-June 2025. Meta also says that when it blocks content based on legal requests from governments and courts, in a majority of cases, it informs users which state authority sent the request resulting in the restriction — however, not in India and some other markets, due to “legal obligations and regulatory considerations”. Queries sent to Meta, Google remained unanswered until publication. The ministries of Home Affairs and IT did not respond to questions on the issue. Industry insiders say that what has also forced companies to step up compliance with the government's blocking diktats is a legal obligation to remove content much more quickly than before. In February, the IT Ministry notified amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, with a contentious requirement to remove content within 2-3 hours as opposed to the previous window of 24-36 hours.