Andhra data centre video blocked: Meta says it doesn’t know who ordered it
The Delhi High Court sought Meta’s reply on a plea by two journalists who worked on the report. The duo said an Instagram reel on the report was blocked in India.
Meta's Content Seal watermark is designed to survive common edits, but the company says heavily cropped images may lose the embedded signal.(Photo: Reuters) The Delhi High Court Thursday sought a response from Meta Platforms on a petition by two independent journalists challenging the blocking of a video report on Instagram, which investigated the impact of Google’s proposed data centre in an Andhra Pradesh village.
The journalists, in their petition, said they were unaware of the exact authority which ordered the takedown. Meta Platforms, too, told the court on Thursday that it does not know which law-enforcement agency passed the blocking order and sought time to produce it.
What the petition states
According to the petition, the journalists, Shamsheer Yousaf and Monica Jha, collaborated on an investigative reporting project titled “Dirty Data” by the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC), a collective of journalists across newsrooms.
It had published a news report in February highlighting how Dalit families in Tarluvada, Andhra Pradesh, were allegedly being pressured to sell land to the government for a proposed 1 gigawatt AI data centre by Google. The report also detailed other impacts of data centres across the country, the petition stated.
A nearly five minute-long video report was posted on YouTube and Instagram in March and subsequently, a shorter version of the video, nearly two minutes long, was then posted on Instagram in the “reel” format on May 19.
According to the journalists, represented by advocates Avanti Deshpande and Apar Gupta, the reel went viral, accruing around 2.6 million views on Instagram, before it was blocked in India three days later on May 22.
Notably, the longer duration videos on YouTube and Instagram as well as the written report remains available.
While withholding the content, it was notified that the video is being withheld owing to a “notice from the Government of India / Law Enforcement under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.”
Highlighting that they are “completely unaware which government authority or law-enforcement agency has ordered the takedown of the 2:01 video reel from Instagram and the reasons thereof”, and that they have not been provided with an opportunity of hearing, the journalists sought restoration of the reel.
What was argued in court
The case was taken up before Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma on Thursday. The journalists’ counsel Apar Gupta flagged, “Usually in these kinds of cases, the intermediary provides a copy of the legal order pursuant to which the blocking (is) actually done.”
Meta Platforms Inc’s counsel Varun Pathak, however, orally informed the court, “What happens is, there is an order passed by a law-enforcement agency somewhere in the country and comes through the Sahyog portal, run by the Ministry of Home Affairs, and then we block the content. Today I don’t know which law-enforcement agency has passed this order… this can be posted after 10 days, I will look (at the blocking order).”
The Sahyog portal, launched in the latter half of 2024, is aimed at expediting the process of sending notices to IT intermediaries by the government or its appropriate agency under Section 79 (3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, to facilitate the removal or disable access to any information, data or communication link with an objective to curtail/detect unlawful/criminal act.
Section 79(3)(b), part of the safe harbour provision, requires that any content flagged as unlawful by the government or its agency has to be taken down first whereafter any grievance or appeal is entertained.
On the other hand, takedown orders/requests under IT Act Section 69A come with safeguards for intermediaries against arbitrary blocking orders, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the Shreya Singhal judgement.
Justice Sharma instructed Meta Platforms to file a short reply. Meta Platforms told the court that they will produce the blocking order on the next date of hearing on July 23.
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