MediaNama held a discussion on April 23, 2026, on the impact and implications of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) proposed amendments to the IT Rules, 2021, on March 30, 2026.
Our objective was to identify:
Download a copy of the event report here.
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On the public record: This report has been submitted to MeitY as MediaNama’s submission to the public consultation on the March 2026 amendments to the IT Rules, 2021. In the spirit of transparent public consultation, we have requested the Ministry to treat the submission as a public record and make it accessible under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
MediaNama’s coverage of the discussion can be found here.
Watch the entire discussion on MediaNama’s YouTube channel:
The 2021 IT Rules brought digital news under government oversight. The October 2025 amendments formalised the Sahyog portal as a centralised takedown channel. The February 2026 amendments compressed compliance timelines to three hours, and the March 2026 draft widens the net from news platforms to ordinary social media users. Each layer has added speed and scale to executive control over speech while removing procedural safeguards. The common principle is speed without scrutiny. Collectively, the amendments to the IT Rules form a censorship infrastructure built incrementally over the past five years.
The opening session described coordinated and escalating patterns of suppression experienced by victims of censorship in India. These included channel demonetisation timed to elections, India-specific account blocking without notice or explanation, takedowns initiated on the basis of thumbnails without officials watching the underlying content, fake copyright claims used to suspend accounts and damage algorithmic reach, and shadow banning.
Molitics’ Facebook page was blocked and its Instagram account suspended without notice. 4-PM was the only Indian channel shut down alongside 16 Pakistani channels following the Pahalgam attack, with the government declaring it anti-national before the Supreme Court intervened and the order was withdrawn. Bolta Hindustan described more than 200 videos being removed without explanation and demonetisation timed to elections. Lokhit India was summoned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) Inter-Departmental Committee for a thumbnail that officials had not watched. Across all four accounts, the pattern was the same: no notice, no explanation, and no recourse.
Speakers across the three sessions converged on a structural diagnosis. The March 2026 amendments do not, in any meaningful sense, “clarify” existing rules, as MeitY claimed. They are the newest layer in a stack that already runs deep. Rule 3(4) elevates Ministry-issued instruments, advisories, and SOPs, which are, by definition, non-binding, to the status of legally enforceable directions, the breach of which could cost an intermediary its safe harbour protections. The IT Act draws its rule-making power from Section 87, which has its own procedural requirements. An advisory issued outside that framework cannot acquire binding force simply because Rule 3(4) says so.
The Rule 8(1) and Rule 14(2) amendments extend Part III’s blocking powers to user-generated news and current affairs content while removing the requirement of a prior complaint from the public. The cumulative effect is a regime in which executive action against speech can be initiated without a complainant, examined by a committee at the Ministry’s referral, and enforced through blocking directions.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has confirmed in an affidavit before the Gujarat High Court that 16,000 police stations have been enabled through the Sahyog portal to send takedown requests. At this scale, with a three-hour compliance window, no platform can assess the legality of each order. Platforms censor first. There is no accountability for unlawful or politically motivated orders, and no meaningful recourse for affected users.
Speakers argued that Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) was decided to address a different problem, horizontal censorship by private parties, and that the doctrine has been overtaken by the central problem of today: direct government censorship of online speech. The government’s own counsel in the Karnataka High Court’s X Corp v. Union of India case acknowledged that Shreya Singhal is outdated. If the government’s appeal against the Bombay High Court order striking down the Fact Check Unit succeeds before the Supreme Court, it could potentially lead to Shreya Singhal being overturned entirely.
Throughout the discussion, several speakers suggested legal and proportionate measures for online speech regulation that do not erode people’s fundamental rights, as well as the procedural and institutional safeguards, including judicial oversight, parliamentary process, transparency, and proportionality, that the Constitution requires before speech can be restricted. The specific recommendations made by speakers are included in the report.
About the discussion
Speakers
Moderator: Adrija Bose, Senior Editor, BoomLive
Moderator: Aditi Agrawal, Independent Journalist
Moderator: Nikhil Pahwa, Editor, MediaNama
Participation:
We saw participation from organisations such as the Ministry of External Affairs Government of India, Amazon, Google, Bar Council of Delhi, DeepStrat, The Hindu, Meta, IndiaMART, ThePrint, Newschecker, The Press Trust of India, Times of India, Central University of Gujarat, PRS Legislative Research, Data Security Council of India, TQH Consulting, The Quantum Hub, BBC Hindi, Software Freedom Law Center, Internet and Mobile Association of India, E-Gaming Federation.
Support and partners:
MediaNama hosted this discussion with support from Meta, Amazon, and Google. Community partners for the event included the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Centre for Communication Governance, and Digipub.
For You
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