Rohan

Fake court orders how? Why? Top 10. As per Reuters, DoT got 129 websites blocked on two fake High Court orders. Last week X told the Delhi HC that the Delhi Police orders against IFF were fake too. 1. Too many censorship bodies. MeitY, MHA, MIB, DoT, state governments, police and courts all issue takedown or blocking orders. 2. Too many censorship laws. 69A, 79(3)(b), IT Rules, BNSS notices, court orders, each with its own format, so nobody knows what a real order should look like. The Sahyog platform by templatisation has only automated the process, not made the orders intelligible. 3. Pressure on platforms to act immediately, even pre-censor. The deadline is three hours and nobody can verify an order in that time. 4. No one to check, just censor. DoT got a fake High Court order on email on a Sunday night and told ISPs to block 34 sites two days later. It was not even on the court's website. Our government is incompetent and trigger happy to take down even global web services. Full domain and app blocking is now a norm. 5. Notices have no legal threshold and rely on subjective perception of offence and vibez. A fake one reads the same as a real one. What’s fact or fiction when our censorship regime is based on magic realism. 6. MeitY is incompetent and can only pressure Silicon Valley platforms to take down more and faster. Ask who issued an order and it says not us. It does not want to provide statistics, shies away from transparency and every six months gets the itch to amend the IT Rules, 2021. 7. Courts pass John Doe and dynamic injunctions so often that lawyers emailing DoT a new list of sites to block is normal. One more email from an "advocate" is not sus to anyone. 8. Orders are kept secret. The person censored rarely gets a copy so they can't say it is fake. We found out only because X forwarded the notices to us, and Reuters because DoT puts court orders online (this category is a rare exception). 9. Platforms are punished only for not complying. Ignore a real order and you lose safe harbour and staff can be prosecuted. Obey a fake one and nothing happens lol. 10. Much of this is automated. Meta reportedly acts on government flags without human review and I4C says it has no record of notices sent through Sahyog. Quite simply, censorship is the norm and speech is put to suspicion.