Almost 30% of MHA’s takedown notices to X target posts on Union Ministers, government agencies

Nearly a third of the 66 takedown notices sent to X, formerly Twitter, by the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) over the past year warn the platform to remove content about Union Ministers and Central government agencies.

Posts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and his son Jay Shah, Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar, and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are among those that have been targeted, according to court records obtained by The Hindu from the Delhi High Court and the Karnataka High Court.

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Over the last year, the government has sent notices to social media and messaging intermediaries — such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — targeting over 1.1 lakh pieces of content for the “removal of unlawful information”, under categories such as deepfakes, child sexual abuse material, financial frauds, and “misleading and false information”. The content targeted for takedown include posts from political parties, news outlets, and individual users in India and around the world.

‘Derogatory content’

This January, the I4C flagged “AI-generated content/manipulated media targeting Jay Shah, Chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC) and son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah,” pushing for the removal of fake images “portraying Jay Shah in a derogatory manner alongside Kavya Maran, the owner of the Sunrisers Hyderabad IPL team.” It said: “The dissemination of such material on social media appears to be a propaganda-driven attempt by vested interests to defame and dishonor prominent office bearers and VIPs through the misuse of technology.” One of the two posts was a fact check debunking the visual, and was not removed by X, while the other was deleted by the user themselves.

X has also received notices to take down content critical of the Home Ministry’s leadership. In one notice in December, X was notified about 54 posts linking to a manipulated video clip of Mr. Amit Shah purporting to show an anti-reservation stance.

Mocking videos

Another post the government sought to take down (which appears to have been deleted by the user who posted it) included a video featuring Mr. Modi, with a caption referring derisively to a promise to “give the country an account every five years”.

Last September, a Texas-based user named Harish Reddy posted a video on X interspersing remarks by the MoS, Mr. Kumar, with comedy film dialogues by the Telugu actor Brahmanandam. The I4C warned the platform to take the video down. The video, with 24,000 views, remains available. Another group of posts on Ms. Sitharaman were also ordered to be taken down in July 2024.

The I4C’s orders also include routine takedowns, such as notices against accounts fraudulently imitating its Cyber Dost helpline, and content inciting religious hatred against Hindus as well as Muslims.

These orders have stayed in the dark for almost two years, as X stopped publishing precise details of government takedown requests in April 2023. However, they have now been disclosed in the ongoing legal battle between X and the Union government on the SAHYOG portal.

‘Censorship portal’

The portal — which X has called a “censorship portal” in submissions to the Karnataka High Court — allows law enforcement agencies and government bodies around the country to send notices under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The I4C was empowered to send notices under this Section on March 14, 2024. However, X says this is a circumvention of legal safeguards against censorship in a different section of the same law.

The Union government insisted on Thursday that notices under this subsection 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. Notices under Section 79(3)(b) do not require the registration of a criminal case. 

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‘Still in trial stage’

Several police officers told The Hindu that they were yet to actively start using SAHYOG as it is still in the trial stage. “If there is a sensitive investigation going on, why would you involve everybody on the portal, as the dashboard can be seen by everybody,” one official said. “It creates records which can be pulled at any time.” 

The SAHYOG portal will soon on-board cryptocurrency exchanges, and eventually also give State police and law enforcement agencies a tool to conveniently demand user data from social media platforms, according to meeting records included in the court documents. A police official who recently gained access to SAHYOG told The Hindu that it is still being used as a trial by agencies, and that in general, Section 79(3)(b) notices rarely yield takedown action by any social media intermediary, with only one in twenty requests resulting in action taken. In fact, law enforcement agencies continue to prefer directly sending requests to platforms instead of going through the SAHYOG portal.`

Some platforms have shown greater compliance than others. For instance, WhatsApp, which has received over 83,000 requests for taking down accounts, has replied in less than 12 minutes in some terrorism cases, the company said. “The stand of WhatsApp is that there are instances when information relating to terrorist activities have been disclosed by WhatsApp within 12 minutes of receiving the request,” the company’s counsel Kapil Sibal said during arguments in the Delhi High Court. While WhatsApp does not have access to message contents, it routinely shares metadata on individual users’ contacts and phone call timing records with law enforcement agencies.