Govt Bypassing Legal Safeguards To Order Content Takedown: X To K'taka HC

Elon Musk-led X Corp reportedly said that the Indian government is using a smart and ingenious workaround to bypass the legal safeguards laid down by the Supreme Court in a 2015 order with respect to take down of content or blocking of social media handles.

The company asked the Karnataka High Court, why the Indian government is following lengthy and complex procedure of safeguards under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act when a simpler route exists through Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules and the Sahyog Portal to issue content takedown notices.

As per an ET report, social media platform X (erstwhile Twitter) has petitioned the HC challenging the way the government issues orders to take down content.

Notably, the union home ministry has a Sahyog portal to automate the process of sending notices to intermediaries. It enables collaboration between government agencies and social media intermediaries.

In Section 69A, content can be blocked only in the interest of sovereignty, security, public order, or similar grounds listed in Article 19(2) that deals with the fundamental right to freedom of speech expression.

As part of it, an inter-ministerial committee is required to review the request and provide affected parties an opportunity to be heard (except in emergencies), and record written reasons for the blocking order.

Appearing for X, senior counsel KG Raghavan, said Rule 3(1)(d) effectively seeks to undo the apex court ruling in the 2015 Shreya Singhal case and must be struck down, because it undermines the safeguards provided in Section 69A of the IT Act.

The senior counsel said that both Section 69A and Section 79 are administered by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), but only Section 69A includes procedural safeguards like an inter-ministerial committee, written orders and judicial review.

He further noted that that instead of using that, MeitY has chosen the easy path, using Rule 3(1)(d) to issue notices without statutory backing

Besides, Raghavan also questioned the legal validity of the Sahyog Portal and said that there is no notification or statutory provision authorising the portal’s creation and despite that, intermediaries are being told to onboard via letters from government agencies.

The central government will present its case in the next hearing which is scheduled for July 17, the report said.

Supporting X’s petition, a media industry body Digipub that represents 92 digital-first publishers and journalists also made submissions in the same matter. The industry body said the difference between online and offline media cannot be used as a blanket justification to sidestep safeguards.

This comes a few days after X alleged the Indian government’s interference in blocking and unblocking accountson the microblogging platform

However, MeitY refuted the platform’s claims and said that it had no intention to block prominent news channels like Reuters and ReutersWorld. On the contrary, MeitY said that it wrote to X to unblock them.

“The Government continuously engaged and vigorously pursued ‘X’ from the late night of 5th July 2025. X has unnecessarily exploited technicalities involved around the process and didn’t unblock the URLs. However, after a lot of follow up on hourly basis, X has finally unblocked Reuters and other URLs after 9 pm on 6th July 2025. They took more than 21 hours to unblock Reuters,” a MeitY spokesperson said on July 8.

It must be noted that the X is trying to scale revenue in India as itcut the prices of its subscription plans in India. The social media platform has slashed prices across all three tiers of its subscription plans (Basic, Premium, Premium+) on both its web platform and app.

The post Govt Bypassing Legal Safeguards To Order Content Takedown: X To K’taka HC appeared first on Inc42 Media.