Indian authorities issued approximately 1.95 lakh online blocking orders to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube between March and July, marking a sharp increase driven by a government portal designed for direct platform notices amid mounting online protests and content scrutiny.
Indian authorities dramatically stepped up online blocking orders between March and July, with Instagram, Facebook and YouTube receiving roughly 1.95 lakh takedown directions in five months, according to data reviewed by The Indian Express. That works out to around one order every 68 seconds, and comes at a time when student protests over exam leaks in Delhi were drawing heavy attention online. Reuters-style reporting on the figures suggests the clampdown was driven largely through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal, which lets agencies send blocking notices directly to platforms.
Instagram was the main target, with close to 1 lakh orders, or just over half the total. Facebook received about 80,000 and YouTube nearly 15,000, meaning Meta-owned services accounted for roughly nine in every 10 directions. The paper reported that many of the notices related to protest content, criticism of the government’s ethanol blending policy, election material from West Bengal and, in some cases, deepfakes. Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal also said some of his Instagram posts were blocked in India.
The scale is far above the earlier pace recorded for Sahyog. RTI data obtained by The Indian Express last year showed 2,312 blocking orders sent to 19 platforms between October 2024 and October 2025, or about six a day. APAC News Network and other reports said the portal, run by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, has become a central mechanism for notices under section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, which is separate from the government’s better-known section 69A blocking power used in matters such as national security and public order.
The company response is also under scrutiny. The Indian Express said Meta has linked its application programming interface to Sahyog so that notices uploaded on the system can trigger automatic removal within the government’s three-hour deadline, without a separate human review. Digital rights lawyers argue that this creates a serious due process problem because, in their view, the company is acting on machine-to-machine instructions rather than testing whether a lawful order has actually been issued. Apar Gupta, an advocate and founder director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told the paper that such automation turns a conditional legal duty into an unconditional one.
The pressure on platforms has increased after the information technology ministry amended the intermediary rules in February, cutting the compliance window from 24 to 36 hours to as little as two to three hours, according to The Indian Express. Meta’s latest transparency report also shows the broader scale of its moderation burden: in the second half of 2025 it removed more than 41,000 items in India, more than double the 28,000 it blocked in the first half of the year, while saying that it does not always identify the requesting authority in India because of legal and regulatory constraints. The Home Ministry and IT Ministry did not respond to queries from the paper.
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