Data accessed by The Indian Express, and published on August 19, 2026, showed that the Union government issued nearly 1.95 lakh content blocking orders across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in the five months from March to July this year. This averages out to one order roughly every 68 seconds, or close to 1,275 a day, a steep rise from the daily average of six orders logged between October 2024 and October 2025 across 19 platforms, figures the newspaper had earlier obtained through the Right to Information Act.
This stretch of months coincided with the student agitation over examination paper leaks staged at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The protests started in early June and wound down on July 25, after then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan stepped down.
Instagram bore the largest share, with close to 1 lakh orders directed at it, slightly more than half of the total. Facebook was next with about 80,000, while YouTube received close to 15,000. Between them, Meta’s two platforms accounted for nine of every ten orders sent to the three companies.
Most of these orders travel through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal, set up under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act. Platforms must remove content that government or police agencies deem unlawful, or risk losing the legal shield that protects them from liability for user posts. According to The Indian Express, Meta has linked its systems directly to Sahyog, so flagged posts come down automatically, with no staff review. This lets it meet the strict three-hour compliance window the IT Ministry introduced through amendments notified in February, replacing the earlier 24-to-36-hour window.
Advocate Apar Gupta, founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, said the arrangement leaves little room for scrutiny. “An API that executes takedowns automatically has no knowledge at all. Nobody at Meta reads the order. Nobody checks whether it comes from an officer of the prescribed rank or states the reasons the amended rule now requires... Machine-to-machine execution converts a conditional legal duty into an unconditional compliance,” he said.
Social media users reported that the material removed included posts backing the protesting students, posts critical of the government’s ethanol fuel blending policy, content around the West Bengal Assembly polls, and deepfakes. Several of his own Instagram posts, Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal said, had been blocked within the country.
Separately, on August 18, a senior IT Ministry official said X “will have to comply with Indian law,”. The remark followed Musk’s announcement that X would start showing users which government had sought a restriction and why. The official added that orders under Section 69(A), used mainly for national security and public order matters, are kept confidential. During the 2024 farmers’ protests, X withheld accounts and posts as directed by the government, though it publicly objected to the move at the time. It has also called the portal an instrument of extra-legal censorship, and has pushed for governments to be more transparent about their takedown requests.
The Hindu reported on August 18 that Meta’s proactive enforcement against hate speech in India has been sliding since June 2025, based on the company’s own transparency disclosures. Proactive rate, the share of violating posts Meta catches before users flag them, stood at 82.2 per cent for hate speech on Instagram in June 2025 and had dropped to 22.3 per cent by June 2026. In May 2026, the same measure had touched a low of 8 per cent on Instagram. Globally, over the same October-December 2025 window, Meta proactively caught 83.9 per cent of hateful Instagram conduct and 74 per cent on Facebook, against about 30 per cent and 32.95 per cent respectively in India. The report found comparable gaps in India for content flagged as bullying and harassment, and as violence and incitement.
The Indian Express said neither Meta nor Google had responded to its queries by the time of publication, and that the Ministries of Home Affairs and Information Technology had not replied to the questions it had sent them.
