Instagram hid a post in India describing how it deletes Alt News fact-checks

On 17 September the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC.in), a Delhi digital rights group, posted on Instagram about how the platform had been deleting fact-checks by Alt News. A day later Instagram made that post unavailable in India. When Scroll reported the restriction and SFLC quoted the report in an Instagram Story, the Story was restricted too. The notice in every case was the same sentence about "automated systems implemented under legal requirements". No order, no agency, no rule was named.

Three posts, one sentence

The story begins with a film teaser. Chauhaan, a Bollywood production starring Ajay Devgn, has its protagonist dismiss pellet guns as a crowd-control tool that causes "limited damage". Alt News, India's best-known fact-checking outlet, published an analysis setting that line against the documented record of blindings and deaths in Kashmir, and on 1 July posted a carousel of it on Instagram. It was removed within minutes. Alt News changed the pictures and posted again; that version went too. The third upload, with two references to Burhan Wani, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander killed in 2016, deleted from the slides, stayed up. Alt News wrote up the sequence on 19 August and noted that a search for the name on Instagram returns nothing at all.

SFLC.in, which has tracked takedowns of Indian journalists since the spring, summarised that case in an Instagram post on 17 September. On 18 September the group received a notice that the post had been restricted in India. On 19 September Scroll published a report on the restriction; SFLC shared it in a Story, and the Story was restricted as well. Scroll's own article, on its website, was not touched. The notice SFLC received reads like the one Alt News got in July:

Instagram notice to Alt News, July 2026, quoted by Alt News and repeated almost word for word to SFLC.in on 18 September

We are legally required to restrict access to your post in certain locations. We have taken this action based on a local legal requirement. [...] through an automated system implemented pursuant to legal requirements.

1. Which law is not stated. Meta's notices in these cases cite India's IT Rules 2021 in general, a set of due-diligence rules for platforms, not a specific blocking order under Section 69A of the IT Act or a notice under Section 79(3)(b).
2. "Certain locations" means India. The post is visible from any other country. Meta does not say so in the notice; users learn it from friends abroad.
3. A "requirement" can be a government notice through the Sahyog portal or Meta's own reading of what the rules oblige it to remove. SFLC says it cannot tell which applies to its post, and Meta has not answered Scroll, Alt News or Medianama.
4. "Automated" is the operative word. Meta has connected its systems to the Sahyog portal by API; flagged content can be removed without a separate human review. A post that quotes a restricted post can inherit the restriction.

What trips the filter: a name, a screenshot

The pattern across the summer suggests the filter reacts to specific strings and images rather than to arguments. Alt News' post survived once "Burhan Wani" was gone. Scroll had a 5 July post about xenophobic Bollywood content restricted when it carried a screenshot of the Chauhaan teaser, and allowed when the same text was reposted with a photograph of Srinagar. Two Scroll posts on 6 August about compensation for pellet-gun victims were blocked outright. Alt News has also had posts with the word "Khalistani" restricted, including a fact-check that debunked a misattributed video of armed Nihangs. Since June, Scroll counts four of its posts taken down by Meta.

Automated by law

Two routes exist for the Indian state to remove content. Section 69A of the IT Act is the formal blocking power, with a committee, a written order and a confidentiality rule attached. Section 79(3)(b) is the shortcut: an agency tells the platform it has "actual knowledge" of unlawful content, and the platform loses its safe harbour if it does not act. The Sahyog portal, run by the Home Ministry's cybercrime centre since 2024, is where those notices are filed. According to The Indian Express, this is the channel that produced the 195,000 orders between March and July, roughly 100,000 of them for Instagram, with a surge during the student protests over exam irregularities that began at Jantar Mantar in June.

When Rahul Gandhi's reel with the Tamil Nadu chief minister disappeared in May, the IT Ministry called it Meta's "internal error". The government's own Press Information Bureau later confirmed that Meta had integrated its API with Sahyog so that flagged content comes down automatically. That is the system SFLC's post ran into. The cases in the group's report show its reach:

Where to appeal: nowhere that works

The IT Rules require Meta to have a grievance officer in India and give users a route to the government's Grievance Appellate Committee. SFLC tried to use it and found the loop closed. Instagram's grievance form offers no category for a post restricted under a legal request; the only path is email, which the group calls "excessive additional friction" with no stated timeline. The appellate committee, in turn, takes complaints only after the grievance officer has ruled. A journalist whose post vanishes during a news cycle has, in practice, no one to ask and nothing to cite.

SFLC's demands are modest: restore the post, state the legal basis, put a human in the loop, and build a challenge mechanism that responds while the story is still alive. The point the group makes about the wider effect is the one that matters beyond India. Nobody has to order Scroll not to show pellet injuries. Once editors know which names and which pictures make a post disappear, they stop using them, and that works, in SFLC's words, "even without a formal government order".

What an Indian reader can do

The restriction is a geo-block, not a deletion. The SFLC post, the Alt News carousel and the Scroll pieces exist and load normally from any other country, or from India through a VPN server abroad, which is legal in India. That helps a reader see what was hidden; it does not restore the post for the audience it was written for, and it does not tell anyone why it went. The habit worth keeping is the one Alt News and SFLC now follow: publish the notice itself. A screenshot of "legally required to restrict access" with a date is the only record of a decision no agency has signed.