Opinion A hard test for X’s transparency pledge in India
X brands itself a free-speech absolutist, yet complies with 83 to 99 per cent of demands. In July 2025, it said the government ordered 2,355 accounts blocked, including Reuters, within an hour — X objected loudly, then complied, restoring Reuters only after a public outcry
The heart of the difficulty is Rule 16 of the Information Technology (Blocking) Rules, 2009, the operative framework under Section 69A, which mandates strict confidentiality over all requests and actions taken. On August 15, Elon Musk distilled X’s latest policy shift in a single line: “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” Rather than quietly withholding a post under a local legal demand, X says it will tell users when a government sought the removal, name the agency, and, where possible, disclose the legal grounds.
Within days came the response from the establishment in India. On August 18, a senior Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) official told reporters that X “will have to comply with the Indian laws,” adding that orders issued under Section 69A are “intended to be maintained as confidential.”
The heart of the difficulty is Rule 16 of the Information Technology (Blocking) Rules, 2009, the operative framework under Section 69A, which mandates strict confidentiality over all requests and actions taken. Secrecy is what lets the executive block content often without a reasoned public order and without notifying the person whose content is blocked.
That is the direct collision. X proposes to publish exactly what Rule 16 forbids — that an order exists, which body issued it, and on what basis. And the stakes are not merely civil. Section 69A attaches criminal liability, including imprisonment up to seven years, to an intermediary that fails to comply. Because X operates as a locally incorporated entity with resident compliance and grievance officers, those consequences land on identifiable individuals inside the country.
There is a more immediate problem: The mechanism does not yet do what Musk claimed. The August release paired the open-sourced “Phoenix” recommendation code with a pilot feature, “Under the Hood”, that shows selected users visibility labels on their own accounts, like spam flags and reach restrictions, not the government request behind a block. A 69A order works separately, and the user sees only the familiar “withheld in India” notice, naming neither order nor agency.
Meanwhile, a growing share of Indian takedowns no longer flows through Section 69A. Since a 2023 MeitY memorandum, ministries, states, and police issue orders under Section 79(3)(b), routed through the MHA’s “Sahyog” portal, which X calls a censorship portal. Section 69A orders themselves have surged, from roughly 6,000 a year through 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025. Where orders arrive without a stated basis, X has little to surface even if it wanted to.
Then there is will. X brands itself a free-speech absolutist, yet complies with 83 to 99 per cent of demands. In July 2025, it said the government ordered 2,355 accounts blocked, including Reuters, within an hour — X objected loudly, then complied, restoring Reuters only after a public outcry.
Nor is the law shifting X’s way. In September 2025, the Karnataka High Court dismissed its Sahyog challenge, calling the portal “an instrument of public good”; X’s appeal and parallel Bombay petitions were consolidated when the Supreme Court stayed all four in July 2026.
Until a court says otherwise, “clearly visible” collides with a wall and the establishment has just said so out loud.
The writer is a defence and tech policy adviser and author of The Digital Decades: On 30 Years of the Internet in India
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