India’s Takedown Nation: Is Internet freedom under threat?

“Take down” has become a common phenomenon and a headache among the social media companies in India. Reason, increasing anti-government posts by people, mostly young generation of Gen Z. These takedowns saw an alarming increase post the formation of Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) in the month of May this year and its call for agitation in July. Post the agitation of 20th July where they marched to parliament social media platforms have become a political battleground attracting huge government interventions as indicated by the ballooning “takedown” orders.

An Indian Express report noted that “one blocking order on an average, every 68 seconds. Around 1275 every day. Nearly 1.95 lakh (take downs) in five months. “As the statistics goes, it was Meta and its platform Instagram which was most affected with over a lakh take downs, followed by Facebook with 80,000 and YouTube with a paltry 15,00, in the period of three months.

Not just take downs have increased, the government has started using face recognition technology to profile the agitators too. “By the fifth week of the sit-in, the most discussed thing at Jantar Mantar was not a placard. It was a white van carrying the Delhi Police crest and a name borrowed from Sanskrit, Ikshana, and the faculty of sight (Chhabra 2026). Eight fixed facial recognition technology (FRT) cameras on a telescopic mast gave it a 360-degree view of the road (Barik 2026a). Inside, on a bank of monitors, live footage of the crowd ran through facial recognition software that drew boxes around faces and matched them against an undisclosed database (Article14live 2026). A second, larger Mobile Command and Control Vehicle stood beside it. Both were parked outside Kerala House, at the heart of a student protest against repeated examination paper leaks. The vehicle had been inducted ahead of the G20 summit in 2023, built for the orchestration of a diplomatic event (Barik 2026b). Three years later, it was pointed at 19-year-olds who were raising slogans of “Inquilab.”, said another article on the issue. If the Delhi Police is claiming about 1600 odd people with criminal records, it is not out of the blue. There was a technological effort to identify them.

While the main event of the season the CJP protest takes various sizes and shapes, India’s Prime Minister entered Gen Z’s favourite medium, Instagram, to communicate with them directly. But the Meta’s algorithm’s did not recognise the Prime Minister and deleted his video, “by mistake”. That led to huge uproar and also the government sought an apology from Meta and summoned their top India officials to the Ministry of Information Technology. An overheated Parliamentary Committee on Information and Communications technology (ICT) asked for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be present before them.

There was surprise in the social media circles on how such a “takedown” of a Prime Minister’s video can happen. Between Meta and YouTube, the latter remains out of all such controversies. The reasons were obvious, as the two companies practised two different routes to “takedown” requests by the government. The government had already made it difficult for the social media companies by ordering a three hour to every takedown request and they had developed in-house methods to heed to such orders.

Typically a takedown request to these companies are routed through a Home Ministry portal called “Sahyog”. Officially the “Sahyog’ Portal " has been developed to automate the process of sending notices to intermediaries by the Appropriate Government or its agency under IT Act, 2000 to facilitate the removal or disabling of access to any information, data or communication link being used to commit an unlawful act. It will bring together all Authorized Agencies of the country and all the intermediaries on one platform for ensuring immediate action against the unlawful online information. This portal will help achieve a safe cyberspace for the Citizens of India.” But in effect it wields the censor’s scissors for the government, to be precise the ruling dispensation at the centre and even States.

Following the creation of Sahyog portal by Ministry of Home Affairs in October 2024, to automate sending of takedown requests under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act (IT Act), 2000, the number of takedown requests nearly doubled again within a single year to 24,300 in 2025. Blocking orders have increasingly targeted criticisms or parodies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the Hindutva ideology of the ruling BJP with this resulting in accounts being withheld in some cases, an Internet freedom report pointed out.

The Sahyog portal has an officer with a DIG status in the security establishment along with the social media companies. Any DIG level officer across India or his/her office, mostly called cyber wing of the police, can flag a takedown of a post in any of the social media agencies. There are various arrangements with the social media companies to comply with the request of the government. Meta has an inbuilt technology arrangement with the portal to flatly comply with the takedown requests. There is no human interface in that arrangement. That explains the huge take downs following the CJP protest, where most of the political posts against governments disappeared. Away from Delhi even the new Kerala Chief Minister found himself in the line of fire for ordering takedowns of his political opponents, which he summarily dismissed.

The reason was later explained the software application of Meta heeded to all requests of the government following their apology to the government of India on the removal of the Prime Minister’s video. It seems all political posts on Instagram and Facebook were under scrutiny and take down orders came in every second through the portal. Literally there was mayhem among the social media space following the CJP protest and hunger strike in Delhi. The fact that Gen Z was abusive over these platforms added to the take down requests. Abuses were not just political, but personal for some of the ruling party’s political leaders. This made the companies sit up and also respond to the takedown request from the government.

YouTube on the other hand does not completely rely on their algorithms for takedown. They have dedicated resources, who monitor the takedown request and pass it through their regulatory team before complying with the orders. That explains why their takedowns were less compared to Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. However, YouTube has maintained that political content on them has increased many fold these years and there are few Hindi news channels with over 20 million flowers on YouTube, not to speak of individual channels of senior media people and others. Most political leaders including Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha have their own YouTube channel, covering live all their public events.

Social media companies have been witnessing a huge increase in political content on their platforms and also the take down orders from the government in recent years. Efforts to quantify the m in number met with failure as none of them were to share the actual heat of politics on the net. This clearly indicates the anti-government political messaging is on the rise in the social media platforms. One of the reasons being the mainline media has been heavily controlled by the government. Though the social media platforms are under the IT Act hence the Ministry of InfoTech technically, it is being controlled by the Home Ministry through the Sahyog portal. The portal is manned by the cyber police divisions of Home Ministry and security agencies across India. That makes them the chief censors of social media, limiting the freedom of speech in the digital space.

The Freedom House statistics on Internet freedom gives India a pathetic status in its ratings, thanks to increasing takedowns on social media platforms. Its, Freedom on the Net 2024 report gives India a status of "Partly Free" with a rating of 50 (on a 0–100 scale, where higher is better), having increased from 41 in 2017. Its Obstacles to Access rating was 14 (0-25 scale); Limits on Content, 19 (0-35 scale); and Violations of User Rights, 17 (0-40 scale). Out of 70 countries rated in the report, India was ranked thirty-seventh. Note that prior to 2019, Freedom House utilized a reversed scoring methodology (where a lower score indicated greater freedom). The Freedom on the Net 2017 report gave India the same status of "Partly Free" with a rating of 41 (scale from 0 to 100, lower is better). Its Obstacles to Access rating was 12 (0–25 scale); Limits on Content, 9 (0–35 scale); and Violations of User Rights, 20 (0–40 scale).] Out of the 65 countries included in the report, India was ranked twenty-sixth.

With the political battle being increasingly fought on digital and social media platforms, and the present government efforts to contain these battles India will further go down in freedom index on Internet. That being the reality, it will also be a huge “takedown” on the free speech enshrined in the constitution of the nation.

(The author is a writer on digital and telecom affairs and has worked with COAI, the mobile industry body.)