India: Video report on land earmarked for a data centre disappears from Instagram on government orders

It remained online for just four days. The two-minute video, published on May 19, was made by Indian journalists Shamsheer Yousaf and Monica Jha, who were investigating a project to build a data centre for Google near Visakhapatnam, a port city in the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The video gives a voice to Dalit families, a community historically discriminated against within the caste system. Locals from the village of Tarluvada told journalists they live in fear and are under pressure to sell their land to the government for the Visakhapatnam data centre, which is slated to become the largest Google AI hub outside the US.

The video was published by the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC), an international network of journalists investigating environmental crimes. Posted on Instagram and other platforms, it went viral, racking up more than 2.5 million views over four days. On May 22, the ERC received a notification stating that the video was no longer available in India, in accordance with the "Indian government/law enforcement authorities under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000".

Under this section of the law, social media platforms may lose their legal protection if they fail to remove content flagged by government authorities. The ERC stated that it had received no explanation "regarding the legal basis, policy justification or specific complaint that led to this restriction".

The full video report remains available on YouTube. It is part of a series of investigations by the ERC entitled Dirty Data, which highlights the environmental and human cost of the global expansion of data centres by major tech companies.

In an article dated April 25, 2026 that cites a source at Meta, the daily newspaper The Hindu, reports that "India is now among a set of "limited countries" where Facebook and Instagram "automatically restrict content, at scale and based on local law requirements". According to the daily, Meta has "has complied with censorship orders on a large scale in recent weeks, as the firm has been hit with a barrage of takedown notices from State police authorities as well as the Union government.".

In October 2024, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs launched the Sahyog portal, a tool which effectively allows law enforcement agencies to request the immediate removal of online content. The tool gives police direct authority to send removal requests to digital platforms, leading to mass content takedowns and limiting opportunities for dissent and independent oversight.

The portal is based on the Information Technology Act of 2000 and the rules applicable to platforms since 2021 (Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, and Rule 3(1)(d) of the Intermediary Guidelines, 2021). These provisions stipulate that if social media platforms fail to remove content flagged by the authorities, they risk being prosecuted alongside the users concerned. However, in India, this measure can be circumvented, as illustrated by the removal of the ERC report.

In May 2025, the platform X stated that it had been ordered to block more than 8,000 accounts in India, including media accounts (such as those of Maktoob Media, Free Press Kashmir and The Kashmiriyat). In July 2025, the platform stated that the Indian authorities had ordered it to block 2,355 accounts, including accounts belonging to the news agency Reuters, under threat of criminal sanctions.