The noose tightens, alarmingly, around our digital freedoms: A weekly round-up on Constitution First

There is a noose tightening around all our throats – dismantling our ability to express, disagree, revolt, and satirise our lived realities on the internet. This noose, actually, has been tightening for a while now through the slow-burn emergence of a type of ‘digital authoritarianism’ in India.

But something has slowly changed about this chokehold – now there is an architecture to this madness, an abusive bending of the IT Act that has evolved not overnight, but through layers upon layers coagulating for several years now. Free speech observers and internet experts have been warning that the sand beneath our feet has been constantly shifting – stand up comedians, independent journalists and fact-checkers, satirists, voices from the margins who have consolidated a space on the internet to question the regime, have increasingly lost that space. Yesterday, the Union government proposed draconian amendments to the IT Rules, which, among other things, create a sweeping power for the IT Ministry to issue binding instruments not anchored in law, like clarifications, advisories, and SOPs, which intermediaries have to follow if they don’t want to lose their ‘safe harbour’ protection under Section 79. It even expands blocking power to users who are not “publishers” but post news and current affairs online — a death knell for independent journalists, or just…alert citizens. Reading the proposal, I could feel that grip becoming stronger, but I saw it, also, as only an embellishment, like a cherry on the icing, of a larger, very intricate structure that has already settled in. 

Last week, the Home Ministry released a harrowing data point – between 2024 and 2025, until March 31 last year, its nodal agency, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (‘I4C’) had blocked 1,11,185 “suspicious online content” under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act – that is 290 takedown notices every single day. Last year, The Hindu had reported that nearly a third of 66 takedown notices sent to X by the I4C sought to remove content critical of the Union government and its ministers. These numbers show a slow shift into the kind of terrain Erdogan’s Turkey occupies today as the harshest regime when it comes to social media takedowns (we have a great despatch this week by human rights advocate Rengin Ergul from Turkey about how State-sanctioned erasure and judicial persecution there is dismantling citizenship identities of the Kurdish people). But the data on these ‘take down’ instructions is only going to worsen from here.

It has worsened because in the last few years the government has almost entirely shifted to abusing Section 79(3)(b) to issue ‘take down’ orders, instead of the standard route of invoking Section 69A read alongside the Blocking Rules 2009. The latter route imagined a ‘Designated Officer’ at the Union government level who would employ a judicial and independent application of mind before issuing take down orders. Section 79(3)(b) has always had a very different purpose – meant to remove the immunity intermediaries exercise from what users post if they don’t take down problematic posts even after the government has asked them to. In Shreya Singhal (2015), the Supreme Court noted that blocking, technically, can only be done through Section 69A, and where Section 79(3)(b) was invoked, intermediaries were only to act after they received ‘actual knowledge’ of a court order directing content removal. These systematic, built-in, safeguards have been slowly thrown into disarray by expanding powers under Section 79(3)(b) and creating what Manu Sebastian calls a “parallel blocking route”. And this is why things are going to worsen further.

There has been a sort of diffusion – where once it was the Union government solely wielding the real power for issuing take-downs, the government has appointed an increasing number of nodal agencies, nodal officers and other posts to permeate deeply into regional internet spaces and censor more and more. In December 2024, for example, a notification by Delhi’s lieutenant governor designated the Delhi police as a nodal agency to issue ‘take downs’ – a state-level police force, an executive wing that has no capability to apply ‘judicial application of mind’, becoming both judge and executioner of what Delhi’s citizens can and cannot post. In January last year, 23 senior policemen were empowered to block content. Delhi and the national capital region also saw the most enormous number of ‘take down’ requests as per the Home Ministry’s report last week. 

And this was just one of the embellishments, only one piece of the puzzle of digital authoritarianism in India. And it's a relentlessly tightening grip, a constantly maturing framework of content blocking – like a portal for smoother coordination between all these emerging authorities with Section 79(3)(b) blocking powers and intermediaries, or an amendment to give exactly three hours to social media platforms to act on government requests or lose immunity, or the proposed amendments yesterday threatening intermediaries to comply with everything the government puts out – not just laws, but even ‘clarifications’.

As exasperating the sheer intricateness of this danger seems, legal challenges are being mounted constantly against these overreaches. But as the sand shifts underneath, it shifts faster and faster every time