Remove all links of Kejriwal‘s April 13 hearing: HC to social media platforms

New Delhi: Delhi High Court on Thursday sought the stand of former CM Arvind Kejriwal and other AAP functionaries on a PIL seeking contempt action against them for allegedly uploading and sharing clips of the court hearing on Kejriwal’s plea seeking recusal of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma in the liquor policy case.

A bench of Justices V Kameswar Rao and Manmeet P S Arora also issued notice to former deputy CM Manish Sisodia; Sanjay Singh, an MP; Congress’s Digvijay Singh and others on the petition by advocate Vaibhav Singh and directed social media platforms to take down the videos of the April 13 hearing.

Unauthorised recording, uploading, publishing and sharing of court proceedings are prohibited under the high court rules, the judges said and asked the platforms whether they could ensure the removal of such content after it was uploaded. “We are concerned with the larger interest of the institution. Otherwise, if we don’t control this, it would go (on),” HC said.

During the hearing, the counsel for social media intermediaries Meta and Google submitted to the court that the links flagged by the petitioner in his plea were already taken down.

However, the petitioner highlighted that certain videos of the proceedings can still be seen on X. HC said, “If that be so, respondent no 4 (X) shall take down those links” immediately upon receipt of notice.

The court also granted the petitioner liberty to approach the counsel for the social media platforms if he finds any other video clips of the proceedings, which will then be removed by the platforms, and issued notice to X, apart from others arraigned as parties in the plea.

The court asked the likes of AAP’s Sanjeev Jha, Mukesh Ahlawat and Jarnail Singh, as well as journalist Ravish Kumar to file their affidavits.

Listing the matter for hearing on July 6, the court also issued notice to Union ministry of electronics and information technology and sought its appearance in the matter.

The senior counsel appearing for Meta contended that as an intermediary, it neither functions as a “super censor” nor does it have the technology to proactively monitor the appearance of specific content, but acts when an issue is escalated according to the law.

“The moment we get to know, we take it (the content) down. The moment we got the letter (in this case from the high court administration), we took it down,” the counsel for Meta said, adding that no case for initiating contempt action against the platform was established.

HC also asked the platforms to disclose if they could identify the first person who uploaded the videos in question. The Meta counsel said since the uploader accounts have been identified, they can supply HC with subscriber information.

Alleging that Kejriwal and his party members hatched a “conspiracy” and “dirty strategy” to record court proceedings, the PIL urged that a special investigation team (SIT) be formed to probe the matter. Contempt proceedings should be initiated against “all respondents who uploaded, reposted and forwarded the recording of the court proceedings,” it added.
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