In the first seventy-two hours after it was published, a two-minute video accumulated 2.6 million views on Instagram. The video, posted on May 19, 2026, by the Environmental Reporting Collective, showed what happens when one of the world's largest technology companies arrives to build a data centre in a village where Dalit families had been allocated land decades earlier. It showed farmers resisting. It showed acquisition pressure. It showed Pyla Kondamma, a Dalit farmer and former village council head, speaking plainly: "They are not touching land owned by dominant castes. Only Dalit land."
Three days later, on May 22, 2026, the video vanished from India's Instagram. Meta did not remove it for misinformation. Did not flag it as misleading. Did not respond to a copyright claim. Instead, the company invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, a law that reads like a neutral intermediary liability clause—the kind of technical provision that global platforms incorporate into content moderation as a basic legal precaution. Yet in India, this provision has become something else entirely: a mechanism for simultaneous economic and epistemic erasure, allowing the state to erase both Dalit land ownership and Dalit voices narrating that erasure.
The restriction was not isolated. Between May 19 and May 31, at least 20 videos from 11 different accounts critical of the proposed Google-Adani data centre near Visakhapatnam were blocked on Instagram. Some documented displacement. Others raised environmental concerns about water resources and forest cover. The government notices cited Section 79(3)(b) without detailing which unlawful act the content was promoting. The Environmental Reporting Collective, Human Rights Forum, and independent journalists received no opportunity to contest the removal—only notification of it, after the fact, through a centralized government portal that has transformed Section 79(3)(b) from a conditional safe harbour into an automated censorship system.
What makes this caste-legible is not the text of the law. It is how the law operates in practice, in a social formation where Dalit communities remain the group least likely to own land in India. In Visakhapatnam district, 68 percent of Dalit households own no land at all. This is not incidental to the story of the Visakhapatnam data centre. It is the story's foundation. When Google announced plans for a 480-acre, 1-gigawatt AI campus in 2024, the land it selected included 200 acres in Tarluvada village—ancestral holdings allocated to Dalit families in the 1970s through a special state programme designed to provide land to the landless. Decades later, that same land became valuable to global capital. The state began acquisition pressure. Families reported being coerced into sales. And when Dalit farmers and human rights organizations documented the displacement and published it on social media, a government that claims to operate under the rule of law invoked a content removal statute to erase the record of dispossession.
The brilliance—if one can call it that—of using Section 79(3)(b) as a censorship tool is that it avoids the procedural safeguards required under other Indian laws. Section 69A of the IT Act, which explicitly governs content takedowns, requires government agencies to justify removal orders and provide platforms with detailed legal grounds. Intermediaries can, in theory, challenge. Users can seek recourse. But Section 79(3)(b) treats the notification as automatic trigger. No scrutiny required. No transparency mandated. When X challenged this in court in 2025, arguing that bulk government removal orders violated constitutional protections for free expression, India's courts upheld the government's authority. The section that was written to protect platform owners from liability has become the mechanism through which they enforce state censorship without friction or accountability.
The double bind this creates for Dalits is not accident. It is architecture. As Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly, formal political rights without substantive power to exercise them amount to a 'top dressing' on undemocratic soil. A Dalit farmer has the formal right to document her dispossession. She has the constitutional liberty to speak. The law says no caste discrimination. But when she attempts to narrate her own loss—when she appears in a video that reaches millions—a state acting under cover of neutral content moderation law simply erases her. She does not get to argue her case. The platform does not publish the government's justification. The video does not disappear because it is false; it disappears because it makes visible what the state prefers to keep invisible.
This is what tech capital's appetite for peripheral land now requires: not just the ability to dispossess, but the ability to dispossess silently. When the Andhra Pradesh government acquired land from dominant-caste owners for earlier development projects, those acquisitions could be protested, documented, and resisted in the public sphere. Newspapers carried stories. Citizens could organize. Democratic procedure, however flawed, remained available as a check. But the 21st-century model of dispossession combines two instruments: administrative procedure that appears neutral and digital infrastructure that silences contestation. The farmer who owns the land can be acquired. The journalist who documents the acquisition can be censored. The video that shows resistance can be erased. All through the operation of seemingly technical, colour-blind law.
The irony—and the outrage—is that governments and platforms present these removals as neutral moderation. Meta did not say: "We are suppressing Dalit voices in service of tech capital and caste hierarchy." Instead, they invoked a statute. They followed procedure. They operated transparently by their own low standards, publishing a notice that the content violated Indian law. The law itself, however, is now a mechanism of caste violence. Not because it names caste. But because it operates in a social reality where Dalit land is systematically vulnerable to appropriation and Dalit attempts to narrate that appropriation are systematically vulnerable to erasure.
What does justice require in response? At minimum, transparency: government agencies must publish the specific legal grounds for removal orders, and intermediaries must retain authority to challenge them. But something deeper is required as well. Courts must recognize that Section 79(3)(b), as presently weaponized, functions as a caste-based censorship mechanism—not neutral procedure, but procedure co-constituted with caste hierarchy. And Dalit communities must reclaim the right to narrate their own dispossession, not through the grace of platforms or government, but through independent infrastructure, print, and organized speech that no intermediary can so easily erase.
The video of Pyla Kondamma still exists. It has been downloaded, shared, archived. But the fact that the state felt compelled to suppress it—to remove it from the world's largest social platform—is itself a kind of confession. It reveals that formal democracy in India is still deeply bound to caste, that land theft requires epistemic theft to succeed, and that Dalit substantive power remains unfinished business. The government's silence—enforced by law—is what we must all now speak into.
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Sources
The Wire: Instagram Restricts Video on Villagers' Protest Against Visakhapatnam Google Data Centre
The Wire: How Data Centres Are Displacing Dalit Communities From Their Land
MediaNama: Meta restricts Human Rights Forum's posts on Google AI data center (June 2026)