One blocking order every 68 seconds: India’s social media takedowns surge

One government-backed order to block online content every 68 seconds. Around 1,275 a day. Nearly 1.95 lakh in five months.

Those figures, reported by the Indian Express on Tuesday, 18 August after accessing internal government data, offer a striking picture of the scale at which the state is now directing social media platforms to restrict online content.

Between March and July, around 1 lakh blocking orders were sent to Instagram, about 80,000 to Facebook and nearly 15,000 to YouTube. More than half, therefore, went to Instagram, which was also a key platform for student and youth protests in Delhi during the period. Meta-owned platforms — Instagram and Facebook — together accounted for roughly nine out of every 10 orders.

The numbers mark a dramatic escalation. According to the IE report, platforms received an average of only about six such orders a day between October 2024 and October 2025.

The surge coincides with the growing use of the Centre's Sahyog portal, a system created under the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre of the Ministry of Home Affairs to facilitate government requests to online intermediaries. The portal became operational in 2024 and has since become an important channel for content takedown directions.

But the numbers raise a more important question: what legal route is being used to order these takedowns?

Much of the activity reported by IE has taken place under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. Section 79 is primarily a safe-harbour provision: it protects intermediaries from liability for third-party content if they meet specified due-diligence requirements. Section 79(3)(b) deals with circumstances in which that protection can be lost if an intermediary does not remove 'unlawful content' after being notified by the government or its agency.

The alternative, Section 69A, is the IT Act's specific mechanism for blocking public access to online information. It carries procedural safeguards, including a designated process for issuing blocking directions and review mechanisms.

That distinction is at the heart of a legal battle that has now reached the Supreme Court.

Elon Musk's X has challenged the Centre's use of Section 79(3)(b) and the Sahyog portal, arguing that the government is effectively creating a parallel blocking mechanism without the safeguards attached to Section 69A. A Karnataka High Court judgment in September 2025 upheld the Sahyog system, but the Supreme Court on 7 August stayed proceedings in challenges pending before various high courts while considering whether the constitutional questions should be heard by it.

The legal significance goes back to the Supreme Court's 2015 judgment in Shreya Singhal v Union of India. The court upheld Section 69A precisely because it considered the provision narrowly drawn and backed by procedural safeguards. The present challenge asks whether the government's use of Section 79(3)(b) effectively sidesteps that framework.

There is also a question of who gets to decide what is unlawful.

Under the Sahyog mechanism, government agencies can send takedown requests to intermediaries. Critics argue that this can shift the burden of deciding what remains online from an established statutory process to government officials and, ultimately, private platforms that risk losing their safe-harbour protection if they do not comply.

The sheer volume now reported makes that concern harder to dismiss as a theoretical one. A system processing nearly 2 lakh orders in five months raises obvious questions about scrutiny, consistency and the possibility of legitimate speech being swept up alongside genuinely unlawful material.

The timing is significant too. The March-July period included major student protests over examination leaks in Delhi, when Instagram became an important platform for protest mobilisation and dissemination of information. The concentration of orders on Instagram during this period therefore merits closer examination, particularly to establish how many orders related to unlawful material and how many were connected to protest-related content.

The question is no longer simply whether India has a mechanism for taking down unlawful online content. It is whether a system capable of issuing one blocking direction every 68 seconds has enough transparency and procedural checks to distinguish unlawful content from inconvenient, controversial or dissenting speech.