The Indian government issued close to 1.95 lakh takedown orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July, signalling an intensified push to control online content amid political protests and misinformation concerns.
India’s social media blocking machine has accelerated to an extraordinary pace, with a report in The Indian Express saying the government issued nearly 1.95 lakh takedown orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July this year. That works out at roughly one order every 68 seconds, or about 1,275 a day, underscoring how aggressively the state has stepped up online content control.
Instagram was the main target, receiving close to 1 lakh directions over the five-month period. Facebook got about 80,000 and YouTube nearly 15,000. Because a single blocking order can cover large volumes of posts or accounts, the figures do not translate neatly into the same number of individual items removed. Meta’s platforms, Instagram and Facebook, accounted for around nine in every ten orders aimed at the three services examined by the report.
The increase appears to have coincided with a series of politically sensitive events, particularly the student protests over alleged examination leaks in Delhi. According to the report, a senior government official said a substantial share of the orders were issued as those demonstrations gathered pace, especially on Instagram. The protests began in early June and ended on July 25 after Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union Education Minister.
The scale of the escalation is clearer when set against earlier data. In response to RTI requests, The Indian Express found that just 2,312 blocking orders were sent to 19 online platforms through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal between October 2024 and October 2025, averaging about six a day. The Home Ministry’s annual report for 2024-25 also said more than 1.11 lakh pieces of suspicious online content had been blocked by March 2025 under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, including via Sahyog.
The report said Meta has connected its application programming interface to Sahyog so it can meet the government’s three-hour removal deadline. That arrangement means content flagged through the portal can be taken down automatically, without a separate human review inside the company, according to the report. Users have said the material targeted included support for the student protests, criticism of ethanol blending policy, content linked to the West Bengal Assembly elections and some deepfakes.
The crackdown comes as India tightens its online regulation framework more broadly. Reuters has previously reported that the government has been pushing for faster takedowns and broader compliance obligations, while Human Rights Watch said draft 2026 internet rules could expand executive control over online speech and chill expression. The Indian Express also reported this year that online blocking orders had more than doubled to 24,000 in a year, with over half aimed at X, as officials pointed to deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation. Meta has said it generally tells users when content is restricted at the request of a state authority, but does not do so in India and some other markets because of legal and regulatory constraints.
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