Over the past five months, the Indian Home Ministry’s Cyber Crime Coordination Center portal Sahyog issued 130 blocking orders (which can consist of a number of different links), to censor online content hosted on large social platforms.
This is the same site that X sued last month, referring to it as a “censorship portal” and refusing to join – something that other tech giants, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others, have agreed to.
The authorities launched Sahyog as necessary to deal with “harmful content.” It operates an automated system that allows the government to send blocking notices to platforms.
But the X lawsuit alleges that Sahyog violates India’s laws regulating the digital sphere while allowing the government to expand its censorship powers.
The Indian Express now reports, citing data obtained through right-to-information requests, that the 130 orders figure does not include blocking orders sent to X.
Sahyog is not the only way the country’s authorities carry out online censorship. To do that, Sahyog uses the Information Technology Act, Section 79(3)(b), whereas others – such as state governments, but also the federal-level Center that’s behind Sahyog, rely on the Act’s Section 69(A).
The key difference between the two censorship mechanisms is that the latter section can only be used to flag limited types of content that are considered harmful from the point of view of public order and national security, whereas the one Sahyog relies on allows for blocking orders to be dispatched “for various reasons,” as reports in the Indian press put it.
When notices sent with Section 69(A) as the legal justification are included in the statistics, the number surges by 785 – and that covers only January and February of this year.
At the same time, the information requests did not reveal how many notices have been sent to X (based on Section 79(3)(b)).
X argues in its lawsuit that the use of Section 79(3)(b) means the government is trying to “bypass the multiple procedural safeguards” that the other section contains.
Non-compliance with the orders means that tech companies could be stripped of their “safe harbor” status, which protects them from legal liability for third-party content hosted on their platforms.