Every tyranny begins with a fight over who may speak. Every freedom expires when a coterie of the powerful decides who may listen. Speech is a covenant between the one who utters and the one who hears, and a society is only as free as the ear of its humblest citizen.
The village chaupal, the smoky coffee house and the querulous letters page were imperfect parliaments of the people, raucous and often mistaken; yet, owned by nobody. That popular platform has now been fenced and privatised. People believe that they conversing with one another, but actually they are murmuring through machines that belong to someone else.
Button-driven machines decide in tenebrous silence whose words shall travel and whose shall perish unheard. John Milton pleaded for “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”. The sequencing of his verbs was symbolic. Knowing came first. A citizen denied unfiltered information cannot fashion an honest opinion, and a citizen bereft of honest opinion is not a voter but a vessel. That right to receive, which Indian courts read into Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, is being hollowed out by two hands in sinister concert—the babu wielding a blocking order and the digital billionaire wielding an algorithm.
The latest confession came from the algorithm itself. Last weekend, X began showing users which of their posts carried a reach-limiting label. One circulating screenshot shows a creator with 229 posts in September, two of them branded as spam by an automated sentinel and hidden from everyone who did not already follow the account. No human scrutiny was done on them and no appeal preceded the punishment. It is like the jailor handing the prisoner a receipt for his own confinement.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he declared, “By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law.” In India, the law has proved wonderfully elastic. In the first half of 2025, X received 29,118 demands to remove content and obeyed 26,641 of them, a compliance rate of 91.49 percent. The self-anointed absolutist became an obsequious subordinate.
The apparatus feeding that invisible hand has since grown Brobdingnagian. Between March and July 2026, central and state agencies sent nearly 1.95 lakh blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube—about 1,275 a day or one every 68 seconds. Most of these missives travelled through Sahyog, which lets ministries and police forces order takedowns while bypassing the safeguards of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Meta has wired itself into it, so flagged content can vanish unseen by any human being.
The surge coincided with the student agitation over examination scandals, which ended only when the education minister resigned. In October, protesters demanding the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner converged on Jantar Mantar. Delhi Police issued at least 200 takedown orders in days, five times their weekly norm. Among them were footage of Rahul Gandhi’s press conference and a reel of a protester holding nothing but a blank placard. The Cockroach Janta Party has seen its accounts withheld, suspended and restored by turns.
The Karnataka High Court has ruled that a foreign company cannot invoke Article 19. The Supreme Court has frozen every challenge pending in high courts. Nor is the opposition unblemished. Congress-ruled Karnataka drafted a law prescribing up to seven years in prison and fines of Rs 10 lakh for “fake news”. Power is promiscuous, and whoever clutches it covets a mute button.
Behind the servile civil servants now stand the billionaires. Musk owns X and Grok. Mark Zuckerberg presides over Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. Sunder Pichai runs Alphabet for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while Neal Mohan’s YouTube decides what half a billion Indians watch next. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and The Washington Post, Zhang Yiming built TikTok and Pavel Durov governs Telegram. Their convictions pirouette with the political weather. Zuckerberg scrapped professional fact-checking after the 2024 American election and admitted the result had partly prompted it. Bezos confined his newspaper’s opinion pages to two approved pillars and told dissenters to publish elsewhere. Donald Trump, exiled from Twitter, simply built his own platform. These men do not convey the conversation. They curate it, bending with vulpine instinct toward whoever holds the licence or the regulator’s pen.
The result is an inversion in the very direction of information. Social media was born as a convivial conversation among equals and is expiring as a monologue. The ‘For You’ feed serves advertisers, regulators and the proprietor’s politics, while the citizen is demoted from interlocutor to supine recipient. One may still speak. But that one simply cannot be found.
A rival perception fervently held in nationalist circles insists that the algorithm is a covert partisan that lavishes massive traction upon strident left-wing voices bent on regime change through incitement. Its supporters cite the youthful violent protests that unseated leaders in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. To them, every viral hashtag is a latent Molotov cocktail and every Gen Z influencer a foot soldier of some foreign-financed insurrection.
The fear is not wholly imaginary because algorithms reward fury, and fury is the currency of revolt. The machine has no ideology except engagement. That is precisely why the perception is aptly suitable power to seek a deterrent. If a government is convinced that the algorithm is plotting its overthrow then it weaponises its self to silence every critic. The spectre of regime change becomes the pretext for the regime’s survival.
The hypocrisy turns grotesque when one asks what these panoptic systems fail to see. In 2025, America’s child-protection clearinghouse received more than 21 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation, nearly 11 million from Meta alone. In January 2026, Grok was generating sexualised images of women and minors on demand, until Indonesia and Malaysia blocked it. These algorithms are ferocious toward dialogue and flaccid toward depravity. None of this denies that the platforms are biased and polluted.
But its cure must be lawful, open and proportionate. Every blocking order should be published with reasons and every affected citizen heard by an independent agency before the axe falls. Sahyog should be dismantled, and Indians deserve a statutory right to algorithmic transparency, a chronological feed and platforms judged by the abuse they prevent rather than the reports they file.
A democratic country does not perish when its newspapers close. It perishes when its people stop noticing what they are no longer permitted to see. If babus and billionaires complete this sterilised world, the next generation will inherit a nation fluent in opinion and famished for facts. And when the silence is complete, there will be no platform left to protest or project.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
Follow him on X @PrabhuChawla