Almost 30% of MHA’s takedown notices to X target posts on Union Ministers, government agencies
The Hindu
Government sends takedown notices to X for removal of content about Union Ministers, Central government agencies, and more.
Nearly a third of the 66 takedown notices sent to X, formerly Twitter, by the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) over the past year warn the platform to remove content about Union Ministers and Central government agencies.
Posts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and his son Jay Shah, Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar, and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are among those that have been targeted, according to court records obtained by The Hindu from the Delhi High Court and the Karnataka High Court.
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Over the last year, the government has sent notices to social media and messaging intermediaries — such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — targeting over 1.1 lakh pieces of content for the “removal of unlawful information”, under categories such as deepfakes, child sexual abuse material, financial frauds, and “misleading and false information”. The content targeted for takedown include posts from political parties, news outlets, and individual users in India and around the world.
This January, the I4C flagged “AI-generated content/manipulated media targeting Jay Shah, Chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC) and son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah,” pushing for the removal of fake images “portraying Jay Shah in a derogatory manner alongside Kavya Maran, the owner of the Sunrisers Hyderabad IPL team.” It said: “The dissemination of such material on social media appears to be a propaganda-driven attempt by vested interests to defame and dishonor prominent office bearers and VIPs through the misuse of technology.” One of the two posts was a fact check debunking the visual, and was not removed by X, while the other was deleted by the user themselves.
X has also received notices to take down content critical of the Home Ministry’s leadership. In one notice in December, X was notified about 54 posts linking to a manipulated video clip of Mr. Amit Shah purporting to show an anti-reservation stance.
Another post the government sought to take down (which appears to have been deleted by the user who posted it) included a video featuring Mr. Modi, with a caption referring derisively to a promise to “give the country an account every five years”.
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