Governments worldwide are no longer hesitant to crack down on social media companies and their executives. In August, Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France as part of a broad investigation into criminal activity on the platform. Days later, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice blocked access to X, one of the country’s most popular social networks, amid a showdown with owner Elon Musk. And this month a Washington D.C. district court will hear arguments about whether the U.S. government can ban TikTok.
Lost in the noise generated by these high-profile disputes, India’s attempts to regulate Western social platforms have received little attention. That may change soon, though, as two recent court cases concerning Wikipedia raised alarms after a high-court judge threatened to ban the encyclopedia if identified users weren’t unmasked and a spokesperson for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) labeled the site as part of the “Western deep state.”
Wikipedia’s parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation, is accustomed to such legal threats, many of which are documented in a
lengthy Wikipedia article titled “Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation.” In similar previous cases, the San Francisco-based nonprofit has always
affirmed that it is “strongly committed to protecting the privacy of editors and users on Wikimedia projects.” To this end, its
privacy policy explicitly states it collects “very little personal information” about users.
But that framing is misleading, as the information the Foundation does possess is often enough to identify individuals given other contextual details – which is exactly why plaintiffs keep asking for it. Given this vulnerability, the Indian court’s aggressive posturing toward Wikimedia personnel and broad interpretations of intermediary responsibility may prove a consequential threat to the online encyclopedia.
“Hostage-taking Laws”
The Indian government issued Information Technology (IT) Rules, 2021 in February of the same year. Observers
immediately noted that these rules provide greater authority to regulate foreign social media companies and control domestic political and social expression on digital platforms.
The rules included Intermediary Guidelines
requiring social platforms and other online service providers to take action against content when ordered to do so by a court or government entity, along with so-called “hostage-taking laws”
compelling these companies to appoint a chief compliance officer in the country who can be legally held accountable for any violations.
The shift’s impact was felt across numerous platforms but was especially pronounced on Twitter, which had previously fought against censorship requests in Indian courts. By 2023, the Washington Post
reported that Twitter (by then rebranded as X) was routinely removing posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration and suspending accounts belonging to journalists and BJP opponents.
In 2022, author and BJP spokesperson Tuhin A. Sinha
initiated legal proceedings against the Wikimedia Foundation after his Wikipedia entry, which had existed since 2006, was suddenly
deleted that March. In his petition, Sinha claimed that the deletion damaged his business and “political equity.” The complaint further stated that the deletion violated the newly adopted Information Technology Rules and relevant Wikipedia guidelines.
In a September hearing, Saket District Court judge Twinkle Wadhwa issued a summons to the Wikimedia Foundation to respond in person. Sinha penned a
celebratory op-ed in response.
“[T]his is a fight against the Western deep state,” Sinha wrote. “Wikimedia’s recent malafide acts of omission and commission, whether it was my profile or any other, was agenda-driven. The objective of this fight is very clear – Wikipedia, like other intermediaries, has to respect Indian laws and conduct itself impartially as it influences perceptions, both personal and political.”
Sinha’s Wikipedia issue seemed to find resolution a month later when an editor
recreated his article. The court case remains ongoing, though, as the matter of compensation is still outstanding.
ANI’s Defamation Suit
This past July, the Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI)
filed a defamation suit at the Delhi High Court against the Wikimedia Foundation over an allegedly slanderous description of ANI on the online encyclopedia.
At the time of the suit, the Wikipedia entry for ANI
stated that the agency “has been criticized for having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events.” (The passage has been slightly reworded since then, but the critical framing remains intact.)
The Wikimedia Foundation responded with a familiar disclaimer noting that the Foundation itself “does not add, edit or determine content” and that editorial decisions are instead determined “by its global community of volunteer editors.”
ANI, in turn,
argued that their attempts to revise the passage “showcasing [the] true and correct position, supported by trusted sources,” were removed by Wikipedia. “This malicious conduct of the Defendants [Wikipedia] ex-facie establishes their ulterior motives of defaming Plaintiff [ANI] by publishing false and misleading content against Plaintiff,” ANI’s plea stated.
In August, the court ordered the Foundation to disclose personal information about three volunteer editors who had restored the alleged defamatory passages to the ANI article after the news agency attempted to remove them.
The Foundation did not comply by the deadline, which ANI
argued “clearly demonstrates willful disobedience of the order.” Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation pushed back, arguing that the delay in providing details about the three editors was strictly logistical due to the Foundation’s lack of physical presence in India.
On September 5 Justice Navin Chawla
agreed with ANI and sent a contempt of court notice to the Foundation.
“It is not a question of the defendant not being an entity in India,” Chawla
explained. “We will close your business transactions here. We will ask the government to block Wikipedia.”
The next hearing is scheduled for October 25 and the Delhi High Court has
ordered an “authorized representative” of the non-profit to be personally present.
Can Wikipedia Be Forced to Comply?
In the United States, the Wikimedia Foundation routinely faces defamation suits, most of which are either
withdrawn or
dismissed due to protections
afforded web platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Other jurisdictions lack these protections, though, and the Foundation has lost numerous cases abroad.
In 2019, a German court
ordered the Foundation to remove parts of the edit history of an article about academic Alex Waibel, as passages from an earlier version of the article were found to be defamatory.
More recently, French luxury events mogul Laurent de Gourcuff engaged in litigation with the Foundation to receive information about a user that he, in turn, wanted to sue for adding
defamatory content to his French-language Wikipedia entry. The Foundation lost the case, and was ordered to provide all of its identification data about the user to de Gourcuff’s company or
face a fine of 500 euros per day.
Wikipedia seems particularly vulnerable under Indian law. In 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation
criticized a prior draft of the IT Rules 2021 which required content-blocking capabilities, local incorporation, and
communication traceability.
“We believe that imposing traceability requirements on online communication is a serious threat to freedom of expression as it could interfere with the ability of Wikipedia contributors to freely participate in the project,” wrote Wikimedia Foundation general counsel Amanda Keton. “An important feature of Wikipedia is that the website does not track its users.”
The last claim is not entirely true, though.
The Foundation retains IP addresses for both registered and unregistered users. In addition, the Wikimedia
privacy policy states that devices interacting with Wikipedia send technical data such as device and browser type, and also the “name of your internet service provider or mobile carrier, the website that referred you to the Wikimedia Sites, which pages you request and visit, and the date and time of each request you make to the Wikimedia Sites.”
It’s unclear how long this information is stored and whether it’s accessible by Wikimedia personnel or Wikipedia administrators. A 2021 Daily Dot
article provided a useful overview of Wikipedia data retention guidelines and loopholes. And the inference from previous cases the Foundation has lost is that they do indeed have information about individual accounts that – if combined with other contextual details – could compromise their identity.
On September 7, an editor who had been active on the ANI article
posted the following message to the talk page, where editorial discussions occur:
“
Hello fellow Wikipedians! As you know, an Indian court has summoned Wikipedia to disclose the identities of users involved in editing this article. I am an Indian citizen and I have the second highest share of authorship in this Wikipedia article on ANI. If my identity is revealed, I may be prosecuted in my country. Therefore, I am considering deleting all my contributions to this article. I am having severe anxiety, please advise me what I should do.
”
Another editor assured this user that the Wikimedia Foundation is unlikely to comply, but the message underscored the anxiety that ANI’s lawsuit has generated among some of the platform’s India-based users.
Tracking Edits
The account names of the three users (defendants 2, 3, and 4) ANI wants further details about have not been publicized, but a survey of the ANI article’s edit history shows that numerous editors have added critical claims and that ANI itself has attempted to reshape content in the past.
Early versions of the ANI article were short and offered only cursory details about the news agency. In 2018 a new account called
Ani digital attempted to
restructure the article to resemble an “About Us” website page, including blatantly promotional language. Other editors quickly reverted these edit attempts and administrators soon blocked the Ani digital account.
In July 2019, a new account called Indianpoliticsresearch
added a nearly 200-word “Criticism” section to the article that summarized
then-recent reporting in The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine. In December 2019, a well-established
editor from Kolkata made a
series of edits summarizing critical
reporting from The Ken, an Indian business news outlet. This version of the article noted that ANI had been accused of serving “as an effective propaganda tool of the incumbent union governments” and was “documented to be a significant purveyor of fake news.”
A year later, numerous editors updated the article to reflect a report from EU DisinfoLab
detailing an influence campaign that used ANI to disseminate fabricated columns and reporting. The report received ample press coverage and these secondary sources – including
BBC News,
Politico, and
The Diplomat – were cited alongside the original report.
Numerous new and anonymous accounts have since attempted to remove these critical passages from the article.
ANI’s plea indicates that at least some of these accounts belonged to them or were operated on their behalf. The three editors they’re
looking to unmask are accounts that undid ANI’s attempted updates – or otherwise added content alleged to be defamatory – within a two-week period this past year.
ANI also
alleges that Wikimedia “officials” facilitated the restoration of the defamatory content, thus negating its
safe-harbor protection under Section 79(1) of the Information Technology Act. This charge likely refers to the “
protection” an administrator temporarily added to the page to limit vandalism and contentious edit wars.
A Bold Bid With a Weak Hand
The claims ANI alleges to be defamatory – about government propaganda, fake news websites, and error-ridden coverage – all reflect critical reporting from legitimate news outlets. This means that the ANI article content firmly aligns with Wikipedia’s guidelines regarding
verifiable citations and
reliable sources.
But all ANI needs to do to win this case is convince a judge that the claims in question are indeed defamatory and that the Wikimedia Foundation – which does, after all, host the Wikipedia servers and facilitate the platform’s operation – is ultimately responsible for publishing them. In this sense, the “unmasking editors” request is ultimately a feint, if one that ANI seems willing to pursue to inflict collateral damage on the site’s Indian editor community.
Both the ANI and Tuhin A. Sinha cases explicitly reference the Intermediary Rules laid out in the Information Technology (IT) Rules, 2021. The goal of that policy framework is to make foreign social media companies responsible for executing national government and court orders. Wikipedia is not generally considered to be “social media,” but it is a collaborative platform that ranks prominently in search results and thus shapes public understanding of key topics – including political issues and sensitive news stories. Bringing the encyclopedia to heel would represent a political and regulatory victory for the BJP apparatus.
As the public battle between Elon Musk and the Brazilian judiciary carried out over the summer, there was an expectation that many of the insults (from Musk) and hardlines (from the Brazilian government) were simply posturing. Brazil was, after all, one of the largest markets for X, with tens of millions of users. Surely the two sides would reach an agreement? Alas, the issues of contention were too politically charged, especially given Musk’s outspokenness against Lula da Silva’s administration and affinities with far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.
That same political and regulatory alignment is evident in India, and Wikipedians are already speculating on the long-term consequences.
“I would personally hate to see Wikipedia get banned in India,” an editor at an India-related noticeboard
said. “India has the largest English-speaking population in the world, especially as a second or third language. A ban could affect access to a valuable source of information for millions, and it would certainly impact Wikipedia’s presence in one of the largest user bases in the world.”
