Instagram restricts political cartoonist Satish Acharya’s account in India
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The Instagram account of political cartoonist Satish Acharya has been restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government.
“We reviewed it against our policies and conducted a legal and human rights assessment,” Instagram said, adding that it restricted access to the content in the location where it was found to violate local law.
The action was taken under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The rules provide a framework for intermediaries to act on unlawful content following directions from authorised government authorities or courts.
Reacting to the development on Monday, Acharya said he had never seen a government that was “so scared of cartoons”.
He also shared a 2018 news report in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said cartoons do not hurt but have a “healing power”. Modi had also said cartoonists were “closer to god” because they can minutely observe the characteristics of human beings.
Acharya described the National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre as “block sarkar”.
Some of Acharya’s recent cartoons were based on The Indian Express investigation published on September 23, which reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times over 10 months to decisions concerning the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, saying some decisions had been taken without their knowledge.
His Instagram account was blocked nearly a month after The Indian Express reported on August 19 that the government had issued nearly two lakh orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July to take down online content.
The figure amounted to nearly 1,275 orders a day, with each blocking order potentially covering hundreds of individual posts, pieces of content or accounts.
In comparison, 2,312 blocking orders were sent to 19 online platforms through the Sahyog portal between October 2024 and October 2025, according to Right to Information records cited by the newspaper.
Of the three platforms, Instagram received the highest number of blocking orders, at nearly one lakh. Facebook received about 80,000 orders, while YouTube received nearly 15,000.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has integrated its Application Programming Interface with the Sahyog portal to comply with government orders.
The integration allows content flagged through government directions on the portal to be automatically removed from Meta’s platforms without a separate human review.