Anti-SIR protest posts by Indian diaspora groups restricted in India; Meta cites IT Rules | Hyderabad News

Hyderabad: Several Indian diaspora groups participating in anti-SIR protests overseas have raised concerns over their protest-related content being pulled down from social media platforms or made unavailable to users in India. They claimed the posts contained only protest announcements or visuals of peaceful demonstrations.“Our post didn’t even say anything controversial. It was just a video collage of our protest outside the Indian embassy,” the South Asia Collective Ireland said in a statement, questioning which Instagram policy its post had violated.According to screenshots and clips shared with TOI, the group organised a protest outside the Indian embassy in Dublin. The post featured a video collage of the demonstration, captioned ‘Building Jantar Mantar outside Indian Embassy, Ireland’. It was marked “unavailable in India” on Oct 24. The accompanying notice said access had been restricted through an “automated system” in accordance with “Indian legal requirements” but did not identify the specific content that prompted the restriction.In another case, Gul Dahiya, an Indian-origin healthcare professional living in Freiburg, Germany, said three posters she had created to publicise an anti-SIR protest with friends were made unavailable in India within minutes of being uploaded. The posters carried messages such as ‘Save Democracy in India’ and ‘Solidarity Protest: Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar must resign’.“I am not even in India; I live in a small town in Germany where I am organising a small protest. But within minutes of posting, I received a notification saying they were unavailable in India,” she said, questioning whether people living abroad did not have the right to speak about their own country.A screenshot she shared shows a notification in German stating that all three posts were unavailable in India. Dahiya said the notification did not provide a specific reason for the restriction.When contacted by TOI, Meta referred the publication to its explainer on the 2026 amendments to India’s Information Technology Rules. The explainer states that the company uses automated tools to detect and review potentially violating content and “also automatically restrict[s] access to certain types of content in India based on legal requirements under IT Rules”.It adds that Meta may restrict access to individual posts, images or videos in India where required under the rules or in response to valid legal orders. The policy also states that the company reviews and acts on valid legal orders from authorised govt agencies and courts, and that users are notified when their content is restricted.Although the explainer says affected users “may have the right to appeal the decision” through an in-app process, Meta did not clarify which provision or mechanism led to the restrictions in these cases, or whether either restriction followed a specific legal order.