On September 29, 2026, Justice Gauri Godse of the Bombay High Court directed X Corp to remove a video by YouTuber Yohan Tengra that repeats claims the court had earlier found prima facie defamatory against Serum Institute of India and its CEO Adar Poonawalla. She also refused to order X to monitor future uploads or suspend the accounts involved, holding that "an intermediary cannot assume the role of an adjudicator or censor," as MediaNama reports, citing LiveLaw.
The order is narrow, and that is its value.
The case for broader orders
The strongest argument for sweeping directions is practical. According to MediaNama, Tengra uploaded a fresh video the same night the court issued its June 2023 order, saying he would not comply. When a defendant treats each takedown as a game of whack-a-mole, a plaintiff has reason to ask the platform for a standing order: remove this, and anything like it that appears later. Reputational harm from a viral video is done in hours, while returning to court takes weeks. A regulator or judge sympathetic to the plaintiff could reasonably say the platform is the only actor with the technical ability to stop repeat uploads.
What the court actually held
Justice Godse did not accept that logic, at least at the interim stage. According to MediaNama's account, the court set out four limits:
- Directions to a platform must concern identifiable content that the court has itself examined.
- A platform cannot be made to judge what is defamatory.
- A platform cannot be directed to monitor a user's future posts or control future uploads.
- Suspending or deleting the accounts would amount to granting the final relief sought in the suit, so it was refused.
The removal direction itself rests on Order XXXIX Rule 2 of the Code of Civil Procedure, the provision for enforcing interim injunctions. The court also issued show-cause notices to Tengra and associated parties, returnable October 27, 2026. Responsibility for compliance sits with the person who made the content, and the platform's role is mechanical.
The background: a Rs 100 crore suit
The order was passed in a Rs 100 crore defamation suit filed by Serum Institute and Poonawalla in 2022 against Tengra, his channel Anarchy for Freedom India, Ambar Koiri and TV10 L.I.V.E. In June 2023, per LiveLaw's report, Justice Riyaz Chagla directed Tengra and Koiri to take down content about the Covishield vaccine and restrained further defamatory publication. SCC Online's report records the date as June 5, 2023, and the citation as 2023 SCC OnLine Bom 1093. The new order is therefore an enforcement step three years later, with the platform brought in because the defendants did not comply.
Why this is the right line
The limit Justice Godse drew tracks the Supreme Court's reading in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015). That judgment struck down Section 66A of the IT Act. According to LiveLaw's summary of the judgment, it also read Section 79(3)(b) so that "actual knowledge" means knowledge of a court order, or a notification from the appropriate government, directing removal of specific material. The reasoning was that intermediaries facing millions of requests cannot be expected to decide which are legitimate.
Three features of that design matter for a pro-innovation, pro-speech view.
First, a defamation finding requires weighing truth, context and public interest. A court does that with evidence and an opportunity to be heard. A platform doing it at scale will err, and the rational error for a company facing liability is to delete. A monitoring duty would therefore function as a prior restraint operated by a private company, with no appeal for the user whose lawful post disappears.
Second, a duty to control future uploads cannot be met without automated filtering of speech nobody has yet judged. That cost falls hardest on smaller platforms, which cannot build such systems, and on legitimate commentary that merely resembles the banned material, for example a news report quoting the claims in order to rebut them.
Third, specificity gives the plaintiff something real. An order that names the URL or video can be complied with quickly, audited, and enforced by contempt. A vague order to prevent defamatory content offers none of that.
The unresolved tension
The ruling is clean on the court-order route but sits beside a different one. In September 2025 the Karnataka High Court rejected X Corp's challenge to the government's Sahyog portal, treating Section 79(3)(b) as allowing takedown requests on a broader "knowledge" standard without a court order, according to Internet Freedom Foundation's account. X has said it will appeal. So Indian law now has a judicially supervised path, where a judge examines specific content, and an executive path with a looser threshold. The Bombay order shows what the first path looks like when it works: a judge views the material, names it, and limits the direction to it.
What to watch
The practical gap remains. Per MediaNama's account, the order means affected parties must return to court when defamatory content is re-uploaded. That is slower than a standing injunction, and plaintiffs will push for faster procedures. The proportionate fix is procedural, not substantive: expedited listing, hash-matching of content already adjudicated where a court specifically orders it, and contempt against the repeat uploader. Each keeps the decision with a court and the sanction with the person who chose to publish.
The October 27 return date will show whether the court is willing to use contempt where the speaker defies it. That, rather than conscripting the platform, is the remedy the order points toward.