On 25 October, Indian users who opened the Instagram page of Khurpench saw a notice saying the account was not available in India. Khurpench is an anonymous account that looks into alleged irregularities in government recruitment. It had about 292,000 followers, and Instagram’s notice cited legal requirements under the IT Rules, 2021. It named no order, no authority and no offending post. That missing information is now common to a wave of restrictions on Meta’s platforms in India.
The scale of the surge
Data accessed by The Indian Express show the Union government issued nearly 1.95 lakh blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July 2026. That averages about 1,275 orders a day, or one every 68 seconds.
The jump is steep. RTI data show 2,312 blocking orders were sent through the Sahyog portal to 19 online platforms between October 2024 and October 2025.
Meta’s own figures point the same way. In its report published on 15 October, Meta said a fall in automated geoblocking in Indonesia offset a surge in India, which it attributed to amended IT Rules that expanded restriction requirements. Meta said most of the Indian items were ones it was obliged to restrict proactively, including identical copies of content, in categories such as online gaming, synthetic content depicting prominent figures, threats to sovereignty, gender-based harassment and promoting enmity between groups.
Source: Meta Transparency Center, integrity reports for H1 2026 and H2 2026
How the system works
Amendments to the IT Rules in February 2026 set a three-hour deadline for platforms to act on official takedown orders. To meet that deadline, Meta connected its systems directly to the Sahyog portal, according to The Indian Express. In April, The Hindu reported that Meta restricts content flagged by the government and police automatically and at scale. When it later finds a restriction legally unsupported, it asks for a separate government direction before restoring the content.
Meta says it acts within the law. Its explainer says restrictions are based on valid court and government orders, that affected users are notified in every case, and that users can appeal in the app.
The advisory
On 10 October, MeitY issued an advisory to Meta. It asked Meta to review its content ranking and recommendation systems so that misleading or out-of-context material about public events would not spread. PTI reported that, according to ministry sources, agencies had told the ministry that Meta’s platforms were not promoting all narratives equally.
IFF argues the advisory has no statutory basis and wants it withdrawn. IFF also acknowledges it cannot say which restrictions, if any, resulted from the advisory, because posts were being withheld before it was issued.
What it means for users
Few dispute that child abuse material, deepfakes and incitement must come down quickly. The open question is whether a system that issues an order every minute can tell unlawful speech apart from speech that is merely critical. That is hard to judge from outside, because the people affected are not told who ordered the restriction, under which law, or which post was the problem. Until notices carry that information, Indian users have little they can actually challenge.
