Introduction
Over the past three years, the Karnataka High Court has become the principal forum for testing how far the Union Government’s power to control online content in India actually extends. X Corp (formerly Twitter) has twice challenged the Government’s takedown machinery before the Court, first over blocking orders issued under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and more recently over the “Sahyog” portal, which facilitates communication of takedown requests under Section 79(3)(b). Both challenges were dismissed by single judges. Both are now pending before division benches. Neither question is, in that sense, settled law. For businesses that operate as intermediaries, publishers, or platforms in India, this matters beyond the specifics of one company’s litigation. It concerns the burden of demonstrating compliance, and where that burden now sits.
The 2023 Ruling: Accounts, Not Just Tweets
Accounts, Not Just Tweets The first dispute concerned blocking orders issued between February 2021 and February 2022, directing Twitter to block 1,474 accounts and 175 tweets, largely connected to content on the farmers’ protest and the Government’s pandemic response. Twitter complied under protest, then challenged the orders on two grounds. First, whether Section 69A permits blocking an entire account or only the specific objectionable content within it. Second, whether reasons for blocking had to be communicated to the affected users, or whether informing the intermediary was sufficient. On 30 June 2023, Justice Krishna S. Dixit ruled against Twitter on both counts. The Court held that separating objectionable from benign content within an account was impracticable, and that account-level blocking served Section 69A’s preventive purpose better than a tweet-specific approach, reasoning that the latter might simply invite a “better luck next time” response from the same user. On notice, the Court held that communicating reasons to Twitter at review committee meetings was sufficient, and that prior notice to individual users was discretionary rather than mandatory.
Twitter’s non-compliance during the interim period also drew exemplary costs of INR 50 lakh. Commentators have flagged an asymmetry in this reasoning: Section 69A was read purposively to expand the Government’s blocking power, while the notice safeguard was read narrowly against the user. No structured proportionality analysis, of the kind Indian courts apply in copyright website-blocking cases, weighing the extent of unlawful content against the lawful content swept up with it, was undertaken before an entire account was blocked. That gap is significant given that proportionality has been treated as a threshold requirement for restricting fundamental rights since the Supreme Court’s privacy jurisprudence. X Corp appealed this judgment within weeks, in August 2023. That appeal, before a division bench, has continued for over two years, with hearings on the adequacy of notice to users and the Government’s refusal to reconsider the underlying orders continuing well into 2024. It remains undecided.
The 2025 Sequel: The Sahyog Portal and Section 79(3)(b)
The Sahyog Portal and Section 79(3)(b) The second dispute arose from an entirely different mechanism. In March 2025, X Corp challenged the Sahyog portal, a Ministry of Home Affairs system that lets government ministries, departments, and police agencies route takedown requests to intermediaries under Section 79(3)(b), rather than through Section 69A’s more safeguard-heavy procedure. X Corp’s argument was structural: Section 79 is a safe harbour provision, not a source of blocking power, and using it this way bypasses the written-reasons and hearing requirements the Supreme Court upheld in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) 5 SCC 1.
On 24 September 2025, Justice M. Nagaprasanna dismissed this challenge too, describing the Sahyog portal as “an instrument of public good” and holding that intermediaries risk losing safe harbour if they do not comply. The Court also held that X Corp, as a foreign-incorporated company, cannot itself claim protection under Article 19(1)(a), a position consistent with the 2023 ruling and a long line of precedent on the constitutional standing of foreign corporate entities in India. X Corp filed its appeal on 14 November 2025, arguing the order violates Article 14, exposes users to unchecked executive power, and rests on a mistaken reading of the Sahyog portal’s constitutional basis. By March 2026, a division bench of Chief Justice Vibhu Bakru and Justice C.M. Poonacha had sought the Union’s response and posted the matter for further hearing. X Corp has told the Court that it received 29,118 government takedown requests in the first half of 2025 alone and complied with over 91 per cent of them, a figure it has cited to contest the single judge’s suggestion that the platform resists Indian law.
The Fintech Dimension: The Same Machinery, a Different Target
The X Corp litigation has understandably framed this debate around speech, but the Section 69A blocking power the Karnataka High Court has twice upheld is not confined to social media accounts. It is the same instrument the Government now uses, with increasing frequency, against unregulated digital lending apps, and the reasoning in the X Corp rulings travels directly into that context. In December 2025, the Minister of State for Corporate Affairs told the Lok Sabha that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had blocked 87 illegal loan applications under Section 69A, following the procedure set out in the 2009 Blocking Rules.
The targeted apps were, in substance, operating outside the Reserve Bank of India’s regulatory perimeter altogether, and had drawn complaints over predatory interest rates, coercive recovery practices, and unauthorised harvesting of borrowers’ personal data. This blocking activity sits alongside the RBI’s own Digital Lending Directions, 2025, notified on 8 May 2025, which impose binding norms on regulated entities, lending service providers, and their associated apps covering data privacy, recovery conduct, and grievance redressal. The Finance Minister has since described MeitY’s blocking power and the RBI’s regulatory directions as complementary tools in the same enforcement effort.
The parallel to the X Corp litigation is direct. A loan app, like a Twitter account, is blocked in its entirety once it is found objectionable, on the same logic Justice Dixit applied in 2023: that severing unlawful features from lawful ones within a single app is impracticable, and that a narrower, feature-specific takedown would only invite a workaround. Equally, the borrowers whose data has already been harvested, and the app operators whose entire business is disabled, receive no individual notice or hearing before a blocking direction takes effect, mirroring the notice question still pending before the division bench in the Twitter appeal. If that appeal ultimately reads a hearing or proportionality requirement into Section 69A, the consequences will land on MeitY’s lending-app blocking programme as squarely as on any account-blocking order aimed at a platform like X. For regulated fintech entities, this creates a layered compliance picture rather than a single one.
AMLEGALS Remarks
For intermediaries and their advisors, the practical position is that compliance with blocking and takedown directions remains the safer course while these appeals are pending, given the cost consequences of non-compliance shown in 2023 and the risk that Section 79 immunity may become unavailable. But the compliance architecture itself, including how it interacts with data-handling obligations as Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 comes into force in phases, should be treated as unsettled rather than fixed, until the division benches, and possibly the Supreme Court, weigh in. That is as true for a lending app operating at the edge of RBI’s regulatory perimeter as it is for a social media platform contesting an account-blocking order: both now sit inside the same unresolved legal architecture.
For any queries or feedback, feel free to connect with Dhwani.tandon@amlegals.com or Mayur.punjabi@amlegals.com