Meta Is Removing India Protest Content — Even When It Has No Legal Obligation To

Key Takeaways

• Instagram posts by the Cockroach Janta Party, opposition politicians including Arvind Kejriwal, news portal Scroll.in, and ordinary protesters have been blocked in India following tense meetings between Meta leadership and the Indian government.
• Meta is removing content under Section 79(3)(b) of India's IT Act — a provision that does not carry criminal liability and under which platforms are not legally required to automatically comply.
• The Sahyog Portal, through which many removal requests are filed by India's Home Ministry, operates without the safeguards present under Section 69A — the provision that does carry criminal liability and requires judicial oversight.
• Critics including the Software Freedom Law Centre India and a co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society have warned that Meta is "removing content it is legally not even required to remove" and building a censorship infrastructure without procedural safeguards.

Posts by political leaders, Cockroach Janta Party members, and ordinary protesters have been disappearing from Instagram at a rapid pace following meetings between Meta's leadership and India's Union government, according to reporting by The Hindu. 

The Indian Youth Congress, Aam Aadmi Party convener Arvind Kejriwal, CJP spokesperson Saurav Das, and news portal Scroll.in are among those whose content has been blocked in India. One early viral clip with over ten million views — featuring a Students' Federation of India activist mocking police announcements at Jantar Mantar — has been taken down.

Screenshots of blocked posts reference India's IT Rules, 2021, indicating the removals are being processed through a formal takedown mechanism. The government, according to The Hindu's reporting, has been pressing Meta in meetings about its recommendation algorithm, targeting the amplification of anti-establishment content as a factor in the youth protests that concluded last month with the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Legal Mechanism

India's IT Act operates through two relevant provisions. Section 69A carries criminal liability for platforms that fail to comply with government takedown orders — it requires judicial oversight and is the provision under which courts have ruled that ordered content must be removed. 

Section 79(3)(b) doesn’t carry criminal liability. Platforms are in legal jeopardy under 79(3)(b) only if a specific piece of content is taken to court and a court rules against them — which, as tech law and policy consultant Pranesh Prakash told The Hindu in April, "happens rarely."

The current wave of protest content removal is happening under Section 79(3)(b). This means Meta is removing content it has no legal obligation to automatically remove. As Prakash put it: "Yet, instead of fighting for their users, Meta is unthinkingly removing content it is legally not even required to remove."

Many of these requests are being filed through the Home Ministry's Sahyog Portal — a system the Software Freedom Law Centre India has described as "a parallel system to take down content online, without any of the safeguards present under Section 69A." Under 69A, there is a judicial process. 

Under the Sahyog Portal's 79(3)(b) route, there is not. The SFLC added that platforms' outsized influence over information access "places a heightened responsibility on platforms to ensure that their moderation processes are transparent, consistently applied, and accompanied by adequate procedural safeguards, including notice, reasons for enforcement actions, and effective mechanisms for review."

The Cockroach Effect in Reverse

We wrote recently about how the Cockroach Janta Party used decentralized technology — mirrored websites, BitChat mesh networking — to stay visible when the Indian government tried to suppress its domain and social media presence. That story was about decentralization defeating centralized censorship. This story is about what happens when governments find a way to reach the centralized platforms directly.

The CJP's spokesman Saurav Das described the removals plainly: "It is unconstitutional and illegal. It is absolutely ridiculous. We appeal to Meta to not succumb to such high-handed pressure from the government. Algorithms must moderate grossly illegal content, not police free expression."

The pressure being applied here is not through court orders. It's through meetings — Meta's leadership sitting across from government officials who have made clear they view the amplification of protest content as a problem to be solved. Meta's automatic compliance with 79(3)(b) requests, without the legal obligation that 69A would create, means the government has found a fast, liability-free path to content removal that bypasses the safeguards that were supposed to make Section 69A workable.

We've covered the India internet shutdown during the Chalo Sansad march, the Delhi High Court allowing withdrawal of the legal challenge to that shutdown, and the Cockroach Janta Party's digital resilience. 

The current wave of Instagram censorship is the same story's next chapter: after failing to suppress the movement through infrastructure shutdown, the government is now working with the platforms that reach the most people to suppress the content directly. The mechanism is quieter than cutting mobile data at Jantar Mantar. The effect is the same.