‘Deeply concerned’: X says it will appeal against Karnataka HC order upholding ...
Social media platform X on Monday stated that it was “deeply concerned” by the Karnataka High Court’s recent order dismissing its challenge to the Sahyog portal set up by the Union government.X added that it will appeal against the order to “defend free expression”.
Sahyog is a portal set up by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre to “streamline” orders to take down content. X has described it as a “censorship portal” and claimed that the Information Technology Act does not contain any provision to create such a portal, or to require social platforms to appoint a nodal officer for it.
On September 24, the High Court upheld the portal’s validity and stressed the need for regulatory oversight of social media platforms operating in India, highlighting that “social media as a modern amphitheatre of ideas cannot be left in a state of anarchic freedom”.
The platform stated on Monday that the order “will allow millions of police officers to issue arbitrary takedown orders through a secretive online portal”.
X claimed that “this new regime has no basis in the law” and “infringes Indian citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression”.
“X respects and complies with Indian law, but this order fails to address the core constitutional issues in our challenge and is inconsistent with the Bombay High Court's recent ruling that a similar regime was unconstitutional,” it added.
The platform was referring to the Bombay High Court order from September 2024, striking down the provisions in the 2023 Information Technology Amendment Rules that would have enabled the Centre to form a fact-checking unit to act against “fake news”.
The unit would have had the power to flag any information about the Union government and its workings as false.
X is deeply concerned by the recent order from the Karnataka court in India, which will allow millions of police officers to issue arbitrary takedown orders through a secretive online portal called the Sahyog. This new regime has no basis in the law, circumvents Section 69A of…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) September 29, 2025X stated on Monday that it disagreed with the contention that it had “no right to raise these concerns because of our incorporation abroad”.
The social media platform had approached the Karnataka High Court after receiving multiple takedown orders from the Ministry of Railways related to posts about a stampede at New Delhi Railway Station in February.
The petition challenged the Centre’s powers to revoke safe harbour provisions under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act
This provision states that online intermediaries, such as social media platforms, can lose their safe harbour status if they fail to remove or disable access to content that is used to commit an “unlawful act” despite being told to do so by government authorities.
Removing this status would mean that the platforms would be liable for the content in question.
The Karnataka High Court had ruled that the Sahyog portal is “far from being a constitutional anathema”, describing it as “an instrument of public good conceived”.
Besides, the court had highlighted that the social media platform follows takedown orders in the United States, but refuses to do so in India, which cannot be allowed.
X had challenged the government’s content-blocking powers in 2022 as well. At the time, it had filed a petition against orders under Section 69A that directed entire accounts to be blocked, rather than specific tweets.
Also read:
[*]How India is using its Information Technology Act to arbitrarily take down online content
[*]‘Excessive power to state’: Why experts are worried about Karnataka High Court Twitter verdict
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