A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
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Snapshot of the day
November 3, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.
In a shocking but hardly surprising move, the Delhi police has asked social media platform X to take down the entire accounts of the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Centre and Geo Blocked in India – not because they posted anything illegal but because they responded to a ‘legal notice’ purportedly issued to them by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The cops also asked for 37 posts to be taken down – which commented on the ‘notice’ – including one by The Wire‘s editor Seema Chishti. In its latest of two communications to X, the police has invoked ‘hate speech’, ‘defamation’, ‘safety/security’ and ‘enforcement of court order’, though it neglects to mention who issued this order or what it says.
Ironically, the purported RSS notice to the IFF, SFLC and Geo Blocked demanded that the organisations stop criticising and documenting the Modi government’s censorship orders. The IFF has issued a statement arguing that the police communications to X fall foul of the law. “A takedown request that accomplishes the demand of an anonymous private notice is not law enforcement. It is the use of state power for a private end,” it said.
Elsewhere, in the government’s ongoing business of censoring Instagram, its latest target is particularly noteworthy: the Congress’s West Bengal handle.
The pattern is becoming harder to dismiss: even terms such as “SIR”, “ECI” and “protest” appear to be enough to invite takedowns on Instagram. Government requests may be triggering automated censorship without any human review, while Meta and the Ministry of Electronics and IT remain conspicuously silent.
