​Digital exile: on digital censorship

A decade-long trend in digital governance in India crescendoed last week when a slew of social media accounts operated by independent activists and journalists were blocked apparently for criticising the Union government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his government’s West Asia policies and the LPG crisis. In seven years, from 2014 to 2021, the number of URLs, posts, and accounts blocked ballooned from 470 to 9,800; since then, there is evidence that entire accounts, especially if they were publishing politically unfavourable comments, were being blocked. There was a wave of censorship during the farmers’ protest in 2020-21; the government restored many accounts after international outcry but this also demonstrated that it was not beyond mass censorship. Similarly, the government used emergency powers under the IT Rules to block links to a BBC documentary in 2023, which also expanded the definition of what constituted a “threat to public order”. But when Twitter (now X) challenged several blocking orders, between 2021 and 2022, in the Karnataka High Court, the High Court dismissed the plea and fined Twitter, further emboldening the state to censor accounts.

In Shreya Singhal (2015), the Supreme Court of India upheld Section 69A of the IT Act 2000 precisely because of its procedural safeguards, including requiring reasoned orders and judicial review. In practice, however, the government has been diluting the safeguards through an expansive use of Rule 16 of the 2009 Blocking Rules, which requires blocking proceedings to be confidential. When this stipulation is invoked to withhold blocking orders or their reasons from affected parties, it undermines their ability to challenge the action in court, eroding the very safeguards that justified the constitutionality of Section 69A. The 2009 Rules also require blocking orders to be reviewed by a committee composed under the IT Rules 2009, yet this is an entirely executive body and has never overturned a government blocking order. In effect, the government is openly and systematically bypassing the right to be heard and violating the doctrine of proportionality. Rule 16 is a procedural rule, yet the government is using it to override the constitutional right to free speech while shielding itself from judicial review. A person’s entire account being blocked amounts to a digital exile, removing the person from the public square, which is a hallmark of an authoritarian government rather than of a liberal democracy. The government’s plan to decentralise blocking powers to multiple Ministries could effectively create a regime of arbitrary censorship, where any department can silence a critic without the specialised oversight, however flawed, of the IT Ministry.