A reporter who filmed a police facial recognition van at a Delhi protest has had her work erased from the internet twice over, first a single video, then her entire account, without ever being told why. The Delhi High Court has now ordered the Union government, the Delhi Police and Meta to produce the takedown orders behind both actions. The case, Ila Kazmi v. Union of India & Ors., has become a test of whether a law meant to regulate online intermediaries can be used instead to make inconvenient journalism disappear without explanation or appeal.
A video, then a vanishing act
Ila Kazmi has reported from the ground in Delhi since 2016, mostly in Hindi, mostly in short video form, building a following of roughly 17,000 on Instagram. In July 2026 she filmed something unusual in plain sight at the Jantar Mantar protests: a Delhi Police van equipped with live facial recognition software, matching faces in the crowd against a database in real time, names and similarity scores appearing on a screen for anyone standing close enough to see. She posted it. Within a day, the video was withheld across India, with Instagram citing only a government notice under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. Seven weeks later, after she posted about a newspaper investigation showing the same facial recognition system had wrongly placed at least 25 people in judicial custody at the protest, her entire account went dark for Indian users.
What Section 79 is supposed to do
Section 79 is not a censorship power. It is a liability shield: platforms keep their legal immunity provided they act on actual knowledge of unlawful content, typically a court order or a government notification. The Supreme Court, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), upheld the provision only on condition that any such notification stay within the narrow grounds listed in Article 19(2) of the Constitution, grounds like public order, decency or security of the state. Reporting on a police deployment in a public square, or discussing a newspaper's findings, fits none of those categories. Nothing in the record suggests Kazmi's content was obscene, defamatory in any adjudicated sense, or a threat to public order. It was, by Instagram's own account-status page, compliant with every platform guideline. The restriction came from government instruction alone.
A system designed to leave no address
What distinguishes this case is not just the takedown but the structure around it. Instagram's notice named no officer, no case number, no reasoning. When Kazmi approached the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, its Section 69A Cell confirmed the block existed but directed her to an unnamed "concerned State department", despite holding the information needed to identify it. Meta's own grievance process could not accommodate her complaint, since its nearest category requires users to admit the flagged content might be unlawful, something she could not truthfully say of her own reporting. This is the pattern the Delhi High Court has encountered repeatedly this year in cases involving the Sahyog portal, a mechanism through which police forces across states route takedown requests to platforms: the originating order surfaces only once a court compels disclosure, and often reveals a police force acting far outside its own jurisdiction.
Why disclosure is the real fight
The Delhi High Court's 9 October order requiring the government and Meta to produce the actual orders is therefore the substantive relief at this stage, not a formality. Without the order, there is no reasoning to contest and no authority to contest it before. The petition, supported pro bono by the Internet Freedom Foundation and argued by advocate Apar Gupta, asks the court to compel that transparency and to allow the issuing authority to be joined once identified. The outcome will bear on a wider question that stretches beyond one journalist's account: whether a safe-harbour provision meant to balance platform accountability against free expression can instead become a route to opaque, unreviewable censorship of reporting on policing and surveillance, precisely the kind of accountability journalism is meant to provide.