In a writ petition filed before the Kerala High Court seeking directions upon the respondents to take immediate steps to ensure the restoration of the petitioner’s Meta/Facebook account provisionally and subject to the result of the writ petition, a Single Judge Bench of Justice Ziyad Rahman A.A. permitted the petitioner to operate the account after removal of the objectionable content as an interim measure.
The petitioner was aggrieved by the blocking of his Facebook account upon instructions for the same by the Kerala Police. It was submitted that the said instructions were issued due to certain contents uploaded by the petitioner.
The Court opined that if there is any objectionable content that affects the State’s security or is against the public interest, nothing would preclude the respondent to issue instruction to block such content. However, upon perusing the material, the Court found that the entire account was blocked only due to certain content.
It was stated that the respondents had exceeded their powers and as an interim measure, the petitioner was permitted to operate the account but only after removing the objectionable content. Hence, a competent officer under the Director General of Police was directed to share the particulars of the objectionable post with their corresponding URLs to the Grievance Officer of Meta Platforms for removal of the same.
However, Meta informed the Court that the petitioner’s account had been blocked since November 2025 and that as per Rule 3(g) of the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the intermediary is bound to retain records only for six months, and since the time period had expired, the data was not available. To this, the petitioner submitted that since his account was only blocked in India and accessible internationally, the data would be available.
Thus, the petitioner was allowed to operate his account and Meta was directed to take necessary steps for the same including removing or disabling access to the objectionable content.
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