By Sanjay Raman Sinha
The blackout on Facebook has put social media giant Meta in the dock—and triggered a confrontation that now extends far beyond a technical failure. The video message by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was intended for students protesting examination paper leaks. When it disappeared from Facebook for several hours because of what Meta described as a technical error, the incident quickly acquired political significance.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology responded by summoning Meta’s senior leadership to New Delhi and demanding an explanation—and, reportedly, an apology from Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg.
What began as a platform outage soon became an omnibus confrontation involving some of the most contentious issues surrounding Big Tech in India: deepfakes, abusive content, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), content moderation, algorithmic amplification and the legal protection enjoyed by social media intermediaries.
Amid the meetings, reports emerged that Zuckerberg had apologised to the government over concerns relating to CSAM, deepfakes and content moderation. Meta attributed the blackout of Modi’s video to a technical error.
The decision by the government to widen the proceedings beyond the prime minister’s video was significant. By bundling the blackout with a broader catalogue of complaints, New Delhi transformed what could have been dismissed as a technical glitch into a more serious examination of how Meta operates in India.
The immediate political backdrop was the student agitation at Jantar Mantar, where abusive and allegedly malicious online content became part of the controversy. Hyderabad Cyber Crime Police had registered FIRs against Meta India head Arun Srinivas over allegedly malicious AI-generated deepfakes and abusive content targeting the prime minister.
But the child-safety allegations are a separate—and potentially far more consequential—matter. They followed a BBC World Service investigation that reported the use of paid Instagram advertisements employing coded language to direct users towards channels associated with CSAM. Meta subsequently acknowledged concerns surrounding the promotion of objectionable material and the targeting of particular audiences.
If established, such conduct raises a fundamental question about Meta’s long-standing position as a neutral intermediary merely hosting content generated by users.
That question leads directly to Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, which provides intermediaries with protection from liability for third-party content, subject to specified conditions. The protection depends, among other things, on the intermediary not initiating the transmission, selecting its recipients or modifying the information, while complying with the applicable due-diligence requirements.
The legal architecture, however, is not without limits. The Supreme Court’s landmark Shreya Singhal judgment in 2015 imposed important restraints on arbitrary online censorship. It struck down Section 66A of the IT Act and clarified the constitutional boundaries within which online speech can be restricted. It also distinguished between mere knowledge of unlawful content and legally enforceable directions requiring an intermediary to remove it.
That jurisprudence creates an important counterweight to governmental pressure.
Section 79 immunity cannot simply be stripped away by an executive committee. Parliament determines the statutory framework, while courts have the authority to decide questions of liability and immunity in individual cases. Section 79(3), moreover, provides circumstances in which intermediary protection may cease, including failure to comply with a lawful government or court direction.
The result is a complicated legal terrain in which the government can summon, investigate, question and demand compliance, but cannot simply legislate through administrative pressure.
Meta, meanwhile, has chosen conciliation rather than confrontation. The reason is obvious. India represents one of the world’s largest digital markets, with hundreds of millions of users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. A prolonged legal and regulatory confrontation with New Delhi could carry enormous commercial and operational consequences.
But beneath the immediate controversy lies a much bigger issue: what exactly does an algorithmic platform do?
Meta’s algorithms do not merely sit passively behind a website waiting for users to upload material. They rank, recommend, amplify, personalise, distribute and monetise content. They determine, to a considerable extent, what users see and what remains invisible. That distinction is becoming increasingly important in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
If a platform’s technology inadvertently suppresses an official message from the country’s prime minister, the consequences are political. If the same technology amplifies a deepfake, promotes abusive material or directs vulnerable users towards illegal content, the consequences can be legal and social.
The Meta confrontation, therefore, offers several important takeaways.
First, Indian law applies to companies operating in India. New Delhi is sending an unmistakable message that global technology companies cannot regard India’s digital space as a jurisdiction outside effective national regulation. Whatever the size or global influence of a company, its operations inside India remain subject to Indian law.
Second, AI creates a new category of regulatory risk. The disappearance of Modi’s video illustrates how automated systems designed to curate or moderate content can produce consequences far beyond their intended purpose. An algorithm may not possess political intent, but its consequences can nevertheless become deeply political.
Third, algorithmic amplification complicates the neutrality argument. The more actively a platform selects, promotes and monetises material, the more difficult it becomes to describe the platform simply as a neutral technological conduit.
But there is an equally important fourth takeaway—and it may ultimately prove the most consequential. The episode is not merely about Meta. It is about who decides what Indians are permitted to see.
The government’s campaign against deepfakes and abusive material can be justified by legitimate concerns about public safety, individual reputation and the integrity of democratic discourse. Protecting children from exploitation is an even more compelling governmental responsibility.
Yet, the same regulatory machinery can become dangerous if it evolves into a mechanism for deciding which political messages should be amplified, suppressed or removed.
The line between legitimate regulation and excessive governmental control is, therefore, becoming increasingly thin.
Social media companies cannot demand unlimited immunity while profiting from the very algorithms that determine what billions of people see. Governments, however, cannot demand unlimited control over those algorithms simply because they dislike their consequences. The real constitutional challenge lies somewhere between those two extremes.
Meta’s apology may have temporarily defused the confrontation. But the underlying dispute is far from over. The blackout of one prime minister’s video has opened a much larger argument about corporate accountability, algorithmic power, freedom of expression and the authority of the Indian state.
The question now is not simply whether Meta can operate in India. It is whether, in the digital republic that India is becoming, the government, the corporation—or the Constitution—will have the final word over what citizens see.
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