HC dismisses X plea challenging govt portal over takedown orders

The Karnataka High Court has dismissed X Corp’s (formerly Twitter) petition challenging the legality of the Central government’s ‘Sahyog’ portal – an online platform used to issue content takedown orders to intermediaries, Bar and Bench reported.

The court had reserved its order on July 29.

X Corp had moved the court after takedown orders issued by the Ministry of Railways over posts about a stampede at New Delhi Railway Station. The social media firm had contended that the Sahyog portal enabled blocking orders under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act), circumventing the due process mandated under Section 69A of the IT Act and the Shreya Singhal ruling. 

But the court has dismissed the petition. Justice M Nagaprasanna held that “social media as a modern amphitheatre of ideas cannot be left in a state of anarchic freedom”, adding that regulation of content was essential to safeguard dignity and prevent offences against women, according to Bar and Bench.

“The petitioner’s platform is subject to a regulatory regime in the United States, its birthplace. Under the ‘take down’ law of that jurisdiction, it chooses to follow orders criminalising violations. Yet the same platform refuses to comply with take-down directions in this nation. This is sans countenance,” the judge said, according to the report.

The court said that every platform operating in India must accept that liberty is yoked with responsibility. 

Among the issues that the court looked at was whether the right to free speech under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution is an unbridled entitlement or is hedged by reasonable restrictions under Article 19(2). It also looked at whether social media needs to be regulated, among several other issues.

The government had contended that the Sahyog portal was merely a streamlined mechanism to ensure quick action against illegal online content. 

“Sahyog portal, far from being a constitutional anathema, is an instrument of public good conceived under the authority of Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and Rule 3(d) of the 2021 Rules. To assail its validity is to misunderstand its purpose,” the court said, according to Bar and Bench.

Reading out the decision in court, Justice Nagaprasanna remarked, “From Orient to the Occident the march of civilization has borne witness to the inescapable truth that information and communication, its spread or its speed, has never been left unchecked and unregulated. It has always been the subject matter of regulation. As and when technology developed, from messengers to the postal age, till the age of WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat, all have been regulated by the regulatory regime subsisting then and subsisting today, both globally and locally.”

Senior advocate KG Raghavan had represented X Corp while senior advocate Aditya Sondhi had appeared for Digipub, a consortium of digital news portals that was allowed to intervene in the case and which Newslaundry is a founding member of.

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