Safe harbour doesn't exempt X from joining Sahyog portal: Delhi HC

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The Delhi High Court on Friday said the "safe harbour" given to social media platform X, formerly called Twitter, under the law does not exempt it from joining the Sahyog portal.

A bench of Justices Prathiba M Singh and Amit Sharma was hearing X Corp's application seeking discharge from an ongoing proceedings on the "lag" in the furnishing of information to police by the social media platforms.

According to X, its plea against coming on board the Sahyog portal was pending in the Karnataka High Court.

"The existing safe harbour provisions, in the opinion of this court, do not give you protection to that extent that you can refuse and say that in the case of crimes we cannot come on board. That's the feeling that we have," the bench observed orally.

Section 79 of the Information Technology Act provides a "safe harbour" to intermediaries by shielding them from any liability for third-party content hosted by them in certain circumstances.

The court said it was "impossible" for investigating agencies to individually approach different platforms for obtaining information, especially when it is urgent.

"Every investigating officer of every police station in the country can't go to 30-40 platforms to get information. It is impossible," the court remarked, adding that several countries in the world have a centralised portal for such purposes.

The senior counsel for X submitted that since the present proceedings pertained to a boy who had gone missing, the court had a limited scope to examine the issue of intermediaries joining the Sahyog portal.

He emphasised that even as per the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), joining the Sahyog portal was only an "administrative measure" and optional.

Sahyog, the government says, was developed to automate the process of sending notices to intermediaries by the appropriate government or its agency under the IT Act, 2000, to facilitate the removal or disabling of access to any information, data or communication link being used to commit an unlawful act.

The portal aims to bring together all authorised agencies and intermediaries on one platform to ensure immediate action against the unlawful online information.

The case before the court pertained to a habeas corpus petition filed by a woman seeking to direct the authorities to produce her 19-year-old son, who had been missing since January 10, 2024.

The court had noticed that there was a "lag" between the seeking of information by police and the receipt of the same from various platforms.

The Centre's counsel has earlier informed that more than 60 intermediaries have come aboard the Sahyog portal, and the Home Ministry's Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had sent requests to others to follow.

On September 24, 2025, a single-judge bench of the Karnataka High Court had dismissed X Corp's plea challenging the legality of the Sahyog portal.

X's appeal against the verdict is pending before a division bench of the Karnataka High Court. PTI