Rahul Somvanshi
Between March and July 2026, India’s government sent blocking orders to social media platforms at a rate of roughly one per minute, according to records obtained by The Indian Express. Over the five-month period, the platforms received approximately 195,000 blocking orders — with Instagram targeted about 100,000 times, Facebook around 80,000 times, and YouTube roughly 15,000 times.
The surge occurred during a period that included student protests against exam leaks at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, which began in early June. Those protests were called off on 25 July following the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Content that appeared to be targeted included posts supporting the student protests, criticism of the government’s ethanol fuel-blending policy, and material related to the West Bengal Assembly elections, as well as deepfakes, the newspaper reported.
The blocking orders are sent through the Sahyog portal, a Home Ministry platform operated under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Historical data paints a broader picture. Between October 2024 and October 2025, RTI records show the government sent 2,312 blocking orders to 19 online platforms via the portal — a daily average of about six. The Home Ministry’s 2024–25 annual report indicated that a little over 111,000 pieces of what it termed “suspicious online content” had been blocked under the same provision by March 2025.
The scale of the operation was made possible by Meta’s integration of its API with the Sahyog portal. Under this arrangement, content flagged by government directions is removed automatically within three hours, without separate human review by the company. This automation has drawn sharp criticism from digital rights advocates, and the legal mechanism behind it has parallels with the kind of automated tracking Karmactive has examined in policing and surveillance contexts.
Apar Gupta, an advocate and founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, cautioned that an API executing takedowns automatically “has no knowledge at all” of context or legality. He argued that machine-to-machine execution converts what should be a conditional legal duty into unconditional compliance, effectively outsourcing content removal to algorithmic systems.
The blocking orders have affected prominent political figures. Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal disclosed that some of his Instagram posts were blocked in India, raising questions about whether the system is being applied unevenly.
The concentration of blocking orders during the student protest period, and the breadth and speed of removals, point to a system operating at scale without meaningful case-by-case review. The reliance on automated API integration means the determinations happen invisibly, without transparency, and without the opportunity for platforms or users to challenge decisions before content disappears. As Apar Gupta has warned, this represents a shift in which legal procedures become technical inevitabilities rather than safeguards. The tension between platform immunity and free expression is one courts elsewhere have weighed: Karmactive has reported on France’s constitutional council blocking an under-15 social media ban on freedom-of-expression grounds.
