130 censorship orders issued to online platforms via Sahyog portal in 5 months
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New Delhi: A Right to Information (RTI) query filed by The Indian Express reveals that the government has issued 130 content notices to online platforms on Sahyog portal under the Home Ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C).
The notices were issued to companies including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft between October 2024 and April 8, 2025.
These notices, sent under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, were in effect to act as content blocking orders.
However, these notices fall outside the purview of Section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act normally used to issue online censorship orders.
The Sahyog portal was launched last year to accelerate the process of sending notices.
The number supplied through RTI ‘do not reflect the notices’ that were sent to Elon Musk’s social media platform X under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act.
Meanwhile, X sued the government questioning the portal, terming it ‘censorship’.
Using Section 69(A) of the IT Act, the IT Ministry had issued 785 blocking orders to several online ‘intermediaries’ between January and February 2025, another RTI application filed by the newspaper shows.
In the event of failing to block access to content flagged by an ‘ appropriate’ government agency, ‘ online intermediaries’ such as X can lose their safe harbour protections, according to the report.
Safe harbour protections provide platforms with legal immunity to host user generated content.
Where the Centre alone can issue take down notices using Section 69(A), state governments and UTs do it through 79(3)(b) of the IT Act.
In the event of failing to take down the links that were flagged in the blocking orders, companies including Meta, X and Google are at the risk of losing their legal immunity from third-party content, according to the report.
