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The Delhi High court restrained Anurag Srivastava (defendant no.1) from directly or indirectly publishing, re-publishing, sending, or posting any tweet or information either in the electronic form or through the internet, email or social media, or any other form which is derogatory and defamatory to the news channel, or its top tier management, its anchors, office bearers, etc. The bench of justice Mukta Gupta also directed Twitter to block the handles of the defendant.
The facts of the case are that the defendant (Anurag Srivastava) posted defamatory content on Twitter against the interests of the reputed news channel India today. According to a suit filed by the plaintiff (India Today TV), the channel alleged that the defendant made false and baseless statements with no concrete evidence against the TV channel and stated that the main anchor took Rs 8 crore to interview a present famous personality. Further, it was contended that the anchor is involved in the publishing of fake news and also was compared to a person who is currently facing extradition charges. Thus, the plaintiff agitated by this filed a suit in the court of law so that strict action can be taken against the defendant. By the suit, the plaintiff sought a decree of the mandatory and permanent injunction to take down the tweets. The counsel for the plaintiff stated that the tweets were rightly taken down from Twitter but on searching is still available on google. In the light of this, the defendant ( google LLC) stated that it will provide a web to the learned counsel of the plaintiff who may have full discretion to delete the search results following which the tweet shall be taken down in all manner.
The court observed that the plaintiff has made a prima facie case and in case an injunction order is not granted in favour of the plaintiff it may cause substantial harm and injure the reputation of the news channel. Thus the court rightly directed the defendant to not publish any such derogatory statement and restricted him to do so. Consequentially, an injunction order was passed and the tweets were taken down from all social platforms.
Injuring the reputation of any person or an institution by making false allegations in a manner in which the society associates the image of the same in a derogatory manner and thus is looked down upon by the members is an offence in India. Section 499 of the Indian penal code punishes a person making such false statements that may gravely injure its reputation. This may be viewed as a conflict with freedom of speech and expression which is a constitutionally guaranteed right. But, the extent of expression is subject to certain reasonable restrictions and while it may be recognized that every person has a right to form an opinion and express but the question before the law is that how far can a person express and if the same is not in the public interest then it cannot come under the ambit of 19 (1).
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