A government advisory instructing Meta to tighten its watch over protest-related content has drawn a sharp rebuke from one of India's leading digital rights organisations. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) on Monday demanded that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) withdraw an advisory issued on October 10, arguing that it creates conditions for suppressing legitimate reporting on police action and civil unrest.
What the Advisory Actually Says
The advisory, issued by MeitY's Cyber Laws Division, asks Meta to exercise heightened scrutiny over content touching on public-order and law-and-order situations. Its language centres on "unverified or misleading claims regarding the imposition of emergency, restrictions, police action or other official measures," and it invokes Meta's due diligence obligations as an intermediary under the Information Technology Act. The document further directs the platform to strengthen its systems for identifying and escalating content that gains traction through recommendation algorithms and could, in the government's view, cause "public confusion, apprehension, violence or disturbance of public order."
Notably, the advisory was never published on MeitY's website. It became public only after Hindustan Times and PTI reported its contents on October 18, more than a week after it was issued - a gap that IFF has flagged as part of a broader pattern of opaque, unpublished directives shaping what Indians can see and share online.
A Pattern of Restrictions Following the Advisory
IFF's statement ties the advisory to a string of content restrictions that followed within days. Molitics India's Instagram account was withheld in the country on October 10. A video posted by Mathrubhumi English, reportedly showing a woman clinging to a pole as police attempted to remove her, was pulled down citing "a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement." Similar restrictions touched an Observer Post Hindi report, journalist Shubhangi Das Gupta's Instagram account, and the Journo Mirror account.
IFF identifies two recurring forms this censorship takes: a notice citing Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, or a message attributing the action to "an automated system implemented pursuant to legal requirements" under the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules. In both cases, the organisation notes, users are not told which specific post, legal provision, or alleged offence triggered the action - a vagueness that makes it nearly impossible to contest the decision or distinguish genuine misinformation from inconvenient documentation of state conduct.
The Legal Stakes
At the centre of the dispute is a structural question about how online speech can lawfully be restricted in India. Section 69A of the IT Act allows content blocking, but only through reasoned, recorded orders. Rule 3(1)(d) of the Intermediary Guidelines sets out a separate, narrower process for takedown notices. IFF's objection is that the October advisory, by nudging Meta toward proactive "enhanced surveillance" and algorithmic downranking of an entire category of protest-related content, sidesteps these safeguards entirely - replacing accountable, challengeable orders with discretionary platform action nudged along by informal government pressure.
IFF has called on MeitY to publish and withdraw its October 8 and October 10 advisories, and to confine any future restrictions to properly reasoned orders under the existing legal framework. It has also asked Meta to disclose every takedown, account suspension, and instance of deliberate downranking of dissenting content, and to reinstate affected accounts and posts unless a valid legal order can be produced and shown to those affected. The organisation says it will offer free legal assistance to anyone whose content or account has been restricted in India since October 8 - a sign that this dispute is likely to extend well beyond a single advisory into a wider test of how protest coverage survives on platforms now operating under increasingly informal state pressure.