“Why three hours? Because campaign silence is 48 hours. If campaigning ends at 5:00 PM on a particular date, the campaign silence begins 48 hours before that, as per Section 126 of the Representation of the People Act. And it could be considered somewhat proportionate,” Snehashish Ghosh, founder of TechNiti and former public policy manager at Meta, said at MediaNama’s discussion on IT Rules and the Future of Online Speech in India, held in Delhi on 23 April. He also said that “it either has the sign of a political party or the photographs of a political leader or any other reference to the political party. It’s quite easy for a platform to make that decision.”

Background: He recalled the 2019 Voluntary Code of Ethics introduced and drafted by the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), which was later approved by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and said to treat them as “a decision/direction of the ECI” in the context of recent February 2026 amendments to the IT Rules, 2021, which introduced a similar three-hour content takedown approach. You can read the full code of ethics here [archived].

What must be checked within three hours: Rakesh Maheshwari, an ex-MeitY official who served as a designated official/designated officer for Section 69A at the Cyber Laws Division at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), laid out what the officials should accomplish in the three-hour window. He said, “So three hours basically means that you have to look at the following:

• completeness of the notice,
• competency of the person who is actually issuing it, the authorisation of this person, and
• sections of the law which are being quoted. Is the person actually authorised under that law? Or maybe you are dealing with some other law, but pointing to unlawfulness under a different statute.”

“If you [designated official] are satisfied on these three things, the government’s expectation is that you need not look further into the content, because that is where a responsible officer of the government has already done that due diligence,” he said.

Authorities need to submit the evidence too, not just URLs: “The fourth thing I also wanted to convey is that the notice must be accompanied by evidence as to why the content is considered unlawful. Simply sharing a URL and asserting that it is unlawful is not good enough. What is really required is an SOP that sets out the elements of what makes a notice complete and comprehensive enough to be acted upon,” Maheshwari further added during the discussion.

Why leaving the judgement to platforms is problematic: “It is not simply about whether the notice is valid, which is what Maheshwari Sir was talking about: signatures and authorisations. For instance, if a notice claims that a post is defamatory, should the intermediary be sitting in judgement to decide whether it is defamation or not? Because what you are now asking them to do is take it down irrespective of whether that evaluation is made. That is the framework in which the reduction of timelines becomes significant in terms of how it impacts regular speech,” said Rahil Chatterjee, Principal Associate at Ikigai Law.

Why we may need a three-hour takedown deadline: “Three hours is an important issue. There are election times. That’s when it was actually decided. I completely agree that if something is already lying for five years and all of a sudden, the government or somebody finds it out and you ask it to be removed in three hours, it’s quite illogical,” said Maheshwari. 

Agreeing with the necessity of tight timeframes for content takedowns in specific situations, Ghosh said, “There might be situations where three hours might be warranted.”

Should all flagged content be removed/blocked within three hours? Ghosh recommended two important points addressing this: 

• “There has to be some gradation. There could be really harmful content that needs to be taken down in three hours. There could be less harmful content which needs to be reported. But overall, I think there has to be one silver bullet when it comes to Section 79 (3b), 69A,” said Ghosh.
• “There has to be some level of standard operating procedures (SOPs) discussion to say what Section 69 has to be used by the government and where Section 79 (3b) needs to be used. Of course, when we are talking about 79 (3b), not every piece of content needs to be taken down in the three hours,” said Snehashish Ghosh.

Implications of a three-hour deadline on free speech: “The point is simply that in three hours, what you are asking an intermediary to do is not applying their mind. That is why three hours versus 24 hours does make a difference,” said Chatterjee.

“Three hours work when you get one order at a time. Three hours doesn’t work when you get hundreds of orders at a time. So that’s impossible,” said Nikhil Pahwa, Founder-Editor of MediaNama.

“The apparatus of the Information Technology Act does not incentivise intermediaries to pause and think and, in the absence of a stronger framework, does not favour users either,” said Torsha Sarkar, Project Manager at the Centre for Communication Governance, NLU Delhi (CCG-NLUD). It is important to note that there were media reports indicating that the government might be considering reducing the content takedown timelines to even one hour. 

MediaNama hosted this discussion with support from Meta, Amazon, and Google. Our community partners for this event are the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), the Centre For Communication Governance (CCG), and Digipub.

Also Read:

• Social media companies raise concerns over Election Commission’s voluntary code of ethics
• How Facebook lobbied the Election Commission ahead of the 2019 elections in India
• Social media platforms and IAMAI enact ‘voluntary code of ethics’ for Elections 2019; Some challenges

You can also read MediaNama’s coverage of this event here.