The government gave orders to block public access to 8146 Facebook links, 2546 Instagram links, 10264 Twitter links, 4675 YouTube links, and 3523 links to other social media and internet intermediaries between 2018 and 2022, the minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Chandrasekhar said that the ministry of electronics and information technology had passed orders to block public access to these links under Section 69A of the IT Act.

Section 69 A of the IT Act gives the government emergency powers to seek immediate blocking of public access to links present on the internet.

In total, internet intermediaries and government agencies blocked a total of 29,154 uniform resource locators (URLs) over the past five years.

Earlier on Tuesday, Chandrasekhar had, in a written reply to the Lok Sabha, in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, the Union IT ministry passed orders to block public access to 2799, 3635, 9849, 6096 and 6775 URLs respectively.

The committee constituted to hear appeals against the blocking of such URLs met 18, 40, 70, 39 and 53 times, respectively, over the last five years, Chandrasekhar had then said.

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