Deepfake Defamation in India: Legal Remedies for AI-Generated False Content

What Is AI-Generated Defamation and Why It Is Worse Than Traditional Defamation

The harm from AI-generated defamation is qualitatively worse than traditional defamation in several respects. First, the content is convincing to a degree that requires expert technical analysis to disprove — ordinary viewers cannot distinguish a well-crafted deepfake from genuine footage. Second, AI tools enable production at scale: a single bad actor with modest technical skills can generate hundreds of defamatory variations in hours, overwhelming any individual's capacity to monitor and respond. Third, AI-generated content often lacks the obvious signals of authorship that enable tracing in traditional defamation — there is no handwriting, no distinctive phrasing, no identifiable account history.

The speed of viral spread compounds these problems. A convincing deepfake video shared on Instagram or X can reach tens of millions of views within 24 hours of posting. By the time the subject has identified the content, engaged legal counsel, and initiated a response, the false impression has been fixed in the minds of a mass audience. This creates urgency that is categorically greater than for traditional defamation, where the content is typically text-based and discoverable before it has reached critical mass.

For public figures, executives, politicians, and anyone whose professional standing depends on public perception, the asymmetry is particularly acute. The damage to reputation from a viral deepfake may take months or years to undo — if it can be undone at all — while the content itself can be created in minutes. This is why the legal response to AI-generated defamation must be designed for speed, and why Indian law has developed emergency relief mechanisms that can respond within hours when invoked correctly.

The Indian Legal Framework for AI Defamation in 2026

India does not yet have a dedicated statute specifically governing AI-generated content or deepfakes. The legal framework is therefore constructed from existing statutes applied to new fact patterns. This is not unusual in the history of technology law — the IT Act 2000 itself was designed to address electronic commerce and was subsequently applied to social media, messaging platforms, and AI systems as those technologies emerged. The absence of specific AI legislation does not create a legal gap; it requires careful analysis of how existing provisions apply to synthetic media.

The foundational defamation remedy is BNS 2023 s.356 (formerly IPC 499/500): a criminal complaint before the magistrate, alongside a civil suit for damages and an injunction. The elements of s.356 (publication, false imputation, intention or knowledge of harm to reputation) are all satisfied by AI-generated defamatory content. The fact that the content was created by an AI tool rather than written by a human does not affect the analysis: the person who directed the AI tool to generate and then published the resulting content is the author for the purposes of s.356. The AI is the instrument; the human directing it bears the legal responsibility.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDPA) adds a new dimension to AI defamation law. The DPDPA regulates the processing of personal data — including biometric data (facial images, voice recordings) — and requires consent from the data principal for most forms of processing. Creating a deepfake using a person's facial images or voice recordings constitutes processing of their biometric personal data without consent, in violation of the DPDPA. The Act provides for significant financial penalties against data fiduciaries (entities processing data) who violate consent requirements, and also creates a right of complaint to the Data Protection Board of India.

The IT Rules 2021 require every intermediary, and significant social media intermediaries more strictly, to act within set times on complaints about specified categories, including content that impersonates a person and sexually explicit content. MEITY has issued specific advisories on deepfakes, characterising them as a serious threat to individual rights and directing platforms to take proactive steps to detect and remove synthetic media. These advisories, while not having the force of statute, are useful context in a complaint; they do not by themselves give a platform actual knowledge of any particular item, which since Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) comes from a court order or a government direction.

What Is AI-Generated Defamation?

AI-generated defamation encompasses multiple forms: deepfake videos placing words in a real person's mouth, AI-generated text that mimics a person's voice or writing style to falsely attribute statements, morphed images combining a person's face with compromising imagery, and AI-fabricated screenshots of conversations that never occurred.

The threat is qualitatively different from traditional defamation because the content is convincing even to technically sophisticated viewers, can be produced at scale with minimal effort, and is difficult to immediately disprove without expert analysis. Each of these characteristics demands a legal response strategy designed for urgency, technical sophistication, and simultaneous action on multiple fronts.

The person who deploys an AI tool to create and publish defamatory synthetic media bears full legal responsibility for the resulting publication. The AI tool is the instrument — analogous to a typewriter or camera — and the human directing it is the author. This principle is well-established in Indian copyright law (where the human author of an AI-assisted work is recognised as the rights holder) and applies equally to liability for unlawful content.

Voice cloning presents a specific evidentiary challenge: audio content is often more persuasive than text and less visually verifiable than video. A cloned voice recording falsely attributing an admission, a threat, or a defamatory statement to a person can be shared via WhatsApp, embedded in podcast-style content, or played in contexts where visual authentication is impossible. Legal action for voice-clone defamation follows the same framework as for video deepfakes but requires specialised audio forensic expertise for the evidence phase.

Deepfake Videos: Which IT Act Sections Apply?

Section 66E of the IT Act 2000 punishes whoever intentionally or knowingly captures, publishes or transmits the image of a private area of a person without consent, under circumstances violating that person's privacy, with imprisonment of up to three years, a fine of up to two lakh rupees, or both. Its scope is exactly that: images of a private area. It is a privacy offence, not a general deepfake provision, and a morphed video or image that shows no private area falls outside it, however damaging it is. For those cases the defamation, identity-theft and impersonation provisions below do the work.

Section 67 IT Act (publishing obscene material in electronic form) and Section 67A IT Act (publishing sexually explicit material in electronic form) apply to deepfake content that is obscene or sexually explicit. Section 67A carries imprisonment of up to five years on first conviction. These sections are the primary criminal provisions for non-consensual intimate deepfake content — a category that has seen significant growth globally and is increasingly affecting Indian individuals.

Section 66C IT Act (identity theft) applies where the deepfake is designed to impersonate the subject — for example, a video that purports to show a corporate executive making a statement about their company's financial position, or a politician making a policy announcement. The section addresses the use of another person's “unique identification feature” electronically, and a convincing audio-visual reproduction of a person's face and voice constitutes such a feature. Section 66D (cheating by personation using computer resources) applies where the impersonation is used to deceive another person to their detriment.

BNS s.356 applies to deepfake content that makes a false imputation concerning a person with the intention or knowledge of harming their reputation. The publication of a deepfake video placing false words or conduct in a person's mouth satisfies all elements of s.356. A criminal complaint before the Magistrate under s.356, with a police complaint under the applicable IT Act sections, is the appropriate criminal proceeding for deepfake defamation that does not involve intimate imagery.

Intimate deepfakes: the two-hour route

A sexualised or nude deepfake is not handled as defamation at all. Rule 3(2)(b) of the IT Rules 2021 requires an intermediary to act within two hours of a complaint by the person concerned, or someone on their behalf, on content that exposes their private area, shows them nude or in a sexual act, or is "impersonation in an electronic form, including artificially morphed images" of them, and the affected person never has to prove that the image is fake. Google separately removes fake explicit imagery, including deepfakes and fake nude photographs, from its results on request.

The deepfake and morphed photo removal guide sets out that route in full, and it is the one to use whoever the target is, a private individual or a public figure; this article covers the non-intimate case. Matters involving a minor are child sexual abuse material and go to the police and the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal, not to any agency.

The DPDPA 2023 and AI-Generated Content: What the New Data Law Changes

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 establishes a comprehensive framework for the protection of personal data in India. Its relevance to AI-generated defamation lies in the nature of the data used to create synthetic media. Deepfake videos require facial images and, for voice synthesis, audio recordings of the target person — both categories of biometric data that constitute “personal data” under the DPDPA. Processing biometric data without the data principal's consent is unlawful under the Act.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 adds a lever for later rather than for now. Section 12 gives a Data Principal the right to have personal data erased where it was processed on the basis of her consent, and it takes effect in May 2027 with the other Data Principal rights. Its reach over deepfakes is also narrower than it looks: the Act does not apply to personal data that the person concerned made publicly available, and the photographs and clips a deepfake is built from are usually ones the person posted publicly; nor does it apply to processing by an individual for a purely personal or domestic purpose. For most deepfakes, before and after May 2027, the defamation, impersonation and IT Rules routes do the work.

The Data Protection Board of India, established under the DPDPA, provides a dedicated forum for complaints about unlawful personal data processing. Filing a complaint with the Board citing the unlawful processing of biometric data in the creation of deepfake content creates an additional compliance pressure on the creator and any platforms that have hosted the content. The Board has the power to impose significant financial penalties — up to two hundred and fifty crore rupees for certain categories of violation — which are meaningful deterrents even for well-resourced bad actors.

The DPDPA also imposes obligations on “data fiduciaries” — entities that determine the purpose and means of data processing. An AI platform that enables deepfake creation using a person's images without their consent may itself qualify as a data fiduciary in violation of the Act. From May 2027, when the Act's obligations on data fiduciaries and the rights of data principals come into force, a complaint to the Data Protection Board becomes available alongside IT Act notices and court proceedings.

Applicable Legal Provisions

Indian law provides multiple applicable provisions. BNS s.356 (defamation) applies because the element of "publication" and "false imputation" is satisfied regardless of whether the content was created by a human or an AI tool. Section 66E IT Act (violation of privacy by capturing and publishing images of a private area) applies only where the deepfake shows a private area. Section 66C IT Act (identity theft by using electronic signature, password, or unique identification feature of another person) can apply to AI impersonation.

Section 67 and 67A IT Act (publishing obscene and sexually explicit material electronically) apply to AI-generated sexual deepfakes. The public-mischief provision of the BNS (formerly IPC 505) applies where the deepfake is designed to incite public unrest.

The DPDPA 2023 adds consent-based and right-to-erasure grounds that apply specifically to AI-generated content created using a person's biometric data. These grounds are separate from and additional to the defamation and IT Act remedies, and they provide access to the Data Protection Board as an additional enforcement forum.

The selection of applicable provisions depends on the specific nature of the AI-generated content: intimate imagery, business defamation, political impersonation, voice cloning, and AI-written false articles each engage a somewhat different configuration of sections. Legal counsel experienced in AI defamation should conduct this analysis for each specific case before determining the appropriate combination of civil, criminal, and regulatory remedies.

Platform Obligations for Deepfake Content Under IT Rules 2021

Significant social media intermediaries — platforms with more than 50 lakh registered users in India, including Google, Meta (Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp), YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and others — carry the heaviest obligations under the IT Rules 2021, but Rule 3(1)(b)(vi) binds every intermediary: each must make reasonable efforts to ensure its users do not host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share content that impersonates another person. Deepfakes, by definition, impersonate real individuals, so a deepfake complaint engages that duty directly.

The deadlines now sit in the Rules themselves, as amended from 20 February 2026. A deepfake that impersonates a person, including an artificially morphed image, is a Rule 3(2)(b) complaint that the intermediary must act on within two hours of the affected person or their representative filing it; intimate imagery runs on the same clock. Content in the other categories listed in Rule 3(1)(b), such as privacy-invasive material, must be resolved within 36 hours. A complaint that rests on defamation alone is outside both windows: defamation left the listed categories in October 2022 and now falls under the residual sub-clause for content that violates any law, so the grievance officer has seven days to resolve it after acknowledging it within 24 hours. A court order or a reasoned government direction is different again: under Rule 3(1)(d) the platform must remove or disable access within three hours. MeitY's deepfake advisories, which preceded the amendment, remain useful context in a complaint but no longer carry the operative deadline.

The same amendment wrote deepfakes into the Rules by name. Rule 2(1)(wa) now defines "synthetically generated information" as audio, visual or audio-visual material created or altered by a computer resource so that it appears real and portrays a person or event in a way likely to be perceived as indistinguishable from the real thing. Rule 3(3) requires an intermediary whose service can be used to create or share such material to deploy technical measures that stop users creating or sharing synthetic content that breaks the law, expressly including content that falsely depicts a real person's identity, voice, conduct or statements in a way likely to deceive, and to label all other synthetic content prominently, with embedded provenance data where technically feasible that the service must not let users strip. Rule 4(1A) requires a significant social media intermediary to ask uploaders to declare synthetic content, to verify the declaration with technical measures and to label what is synthetic, and a platform that knowingly permits or fails to act on synthetic content in breach of the Rules is deemed to have failed that duty. A deepfake complaint can therefore point to a specific due-diligence duty the platform has not met, and not only to the content.

An intermediary that fails to observe these rules loses the protection of section 79(1) for that failure under Rule 7, which is the commercial pressure a well-drafted grievance complaint applies. It is not, however, a takedown order: since Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) the "actual knowledge" that obliges an intermediary to remove content arises only from a court order or a government direction, never from a private notice, so a complaint the platform declines to act on is escalated to court rather than argued with the grievance officer. In practice the major platforms' grievance officers have established processes for deepfake complaints, and a complaint from the partner law firm's advocates that cites specific URLs or content identifiers is the format they act on.

For platforms that do not comply with IT Act notices, the escalation path is an application to the competent court for a mandatory order directing removal: a civil suit with an injunction application, or a writ petition in the High Court where the relief is sought against the State. Courts have issued such orders against foreign-headquartered platforms, as the Bombay High Court did in the Gadkari matter on 5 August 2026. The contempt jurisdiction of the courts — which can result in significant penalties including imprisonment of responsible officers — provides a strong enforcement mechanism for court-ordered platform compliance.

Copyright as a Removal Tool

Original photographs, voice recordings, and videos of an individual are protected by copyright — typically owned by the photographer, videographer, or the individual themselves where a selfie or personal recording is concerned. AI-generated deepfakes that incorporate these protected source materials infringe copyright in the underlying work.

DMCA takedown notices citing copyright in the source photographs or videos used to create the deepfake, where the complainant owns that copyright, are legally valid and are processed by platforms on 24-48 hour timelines. This is often the fastest removal route for AI-generated content on US-hosted platforms, running in parallel with IT Act notices for the Indian law dimension.

Copyright takedown operates independently of defamation law — a successful DMCA notice does not require establishing that the content is defamatory, only that it incorporates copyright-protected material without authorisation. This makes it a particularly useful tool where the defamation claim requires legal analysis that takes time, while the copyright claim can be assessed and filed rapidly.

Where the deepfake does not incorporate identifiable source material for which the subject holds copyright — for example, where it is constructed entirely from publicly available imagery — the copyright route may not be available, and the defamation and IT Act routes become the primary mechanisms. Legal counsel should assess copyright availability as part of the initial triage in any deepfake case.

Emergency Injunctions for Viral Deepfakes: The 48-Hour Court Track

An ex parte interim injunction — a court order obtained without notice to the defendant — is the most powerful immediate legal tool for viral deepfake content. "Ex parte" relief is granted where giving notice to the defendant before the order is made would defeat the purpose of the relief, or where the urgency is such that waiting for the defendant to appear would cause irreparable harm. Both conditions are readily satisfied in viral deepfake scenarios: notifying the defendant may cause them to take steps to distribute the content more widely, and the reputational harm from a viral video compounds with every additional hour of circulation.

Courts have mechanisms for urgent applications that can be placed before a judge at short notice in appropriate cases; a suit goes to the High Court's original side only in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, and to the competent civil court everywhere else. The application must demonstrate: a prima facie case (the content is clearly defamatory or otherwise unlawful); irreparable harm (reputational damage that cannot be fully compensated by money); and balance of convenience (the harm from restraint to the defendant is less than the harm from non-restraint to the applicant). For deepfake defamation, all three elements are typically demonstrable with the evidence available on the first day.

The ex parte interim injunction, once granted, is served on the defendant and on the relevant platforms. Platform compliance with a court order is not discretionary: Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules 2021 requires the intermediary to remove or disable access within three hours of receiving it, and the order also carries the force of the contempt jurisdiction: failure to comply can result in the platform or its officers being held in contempt of court, which is a serious sanction.

Following the ex parte order, the matter returns to court for an inter partes hearing — where the defendant has an opportunity to be heard. At this stage, the applicant must establish the case more fully. If the defendant cannot demonstrate that the deepfake is genuine or that its publication is protected by any exception, the interim injunction is confirmed as an ongoing restraint while the main case is tried. In practice, many deepfake defendants withdraw the content and settle rather than pursue contested litigation once an ex parte order has been granted.

Tracing the Creator of a Deepfake: Technical and Legal Investigation Methods

Identifying the creator of a deepfake requires a combination of technical forensic analysis and legal compulsion of platform disclosures. Technical methods include: metadata analysis of the deepfake file (video files retain creation metadata, rendering tool signatures, and sometimes platform upload markers that can identify the software and device used); reverse image search of the source photographs used in the deepfake (which may identify where those photographs were originally published and who had access to them); and forensic analysis of the deepfake for "fingerprints" of specific AI generation tools, which have identifiable artefacts in their output.

Platform disclosure through legal process is the most reliable identification route when technical analysis is inconclusive. A court order directing a platform to disclose the account registration details (email address, phone number, IP address at account creation) of the account that uploaded the deepfake can be granted by the court hearing the suit where a prima facie case is established, as the Bombay High Court directed in the Gadkari matter. IP address disclosure, combined with a subsequent order to the internet service provider to identify the subscriber associated with that IP, can identify the physical location and identity of the uploader.

Where the deepfake was created using an AI-as-a-service platform (such as a deepfake creation website), the platform itself may retain records of who used its service to create content involving specific individuals. Legal notices and court orders to these platforms — which are often incorporated in jurisdictions outside India — are part of the investigation strategy. Some jurisdictions have mutual legal assistance arrangements with India that enable enforcement of Indian court orders against foreign-incorporated platforms.

Cybercrime police in India — specifically the units operating under the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell of State Police forces — have investigative capabilities and international cooperation relationships that are available to supplement private legal action. Filing a police complaint and engaging the Cybercrime Cell as an additional investigation track is advisable in cases where the creator appears to be operating from outside India or through technical means designed to obscure identity.

Criminal Complaints for Deepfakes: Police FIR and Cybercrime Cell

A police complaint about a deepfake should be filed under the cognisable offences it discloses: IT Act 66C (identity theft), IT Act 66D (personation by computer), IT Act 66E (where the image shows a private area), and, where the content is sexually explicit, IT Act 67/67A. Defamation under BNS s.356 is non-cognisable and is not a ground for an FIR; it goes to the Magistrate as a separate complaint. The FIR must be supported by a complete evidence file: the deepfake content itself (downloaded and preserved before removal), the URLs at which it was hosted, timestamped screenshots showing its spread, and any information about who may have created it.

The Cyber Crime Investigation Cell (CCIC) of State Police forces is the appropriate unit for deepfake investigations. Unlike general police stations, Cyber Cells have technical equipment and trained personnel for digital forensics, platform coordination, and international cooperation for cases involving foreign-hosted platforms. Many State CCICs have established relationships with platforms' law enforcement response teams and can obtain account information and content preservation orders more quickly than the civil court process.

Case outcome expectations should be set realistically. Criminal investigation of deepfake cases is technically demanding, and outcomes depend heavily on whether the creator can be identified and whether the creator is within Indian jurisdiction. Where the creator is identified and within India, the criminal process — FIR, investigation, charge sheet, trial — follows the standard criminal-procedure timeline, which is measured in years for contested matters. However, the FIR registration and investigation themselves create significant pressure: most deepfake creators are not professional criminals and the reality of facing criminal proceedings motivates early resolution through content removal and retraction.

Prosecution outcomes for deepfake defamation in India are still limited in number, reflecting the novelty of the problem rather than the inadequacy of the law. The legal provisions are clearly applicable. As Cyber Cells build expertise and case law develops, the deterrent effect of criminal prosecution for AI-generated defamation will strengthen. RepuLex coordinates police complaint preparation in AI defamation cases, ensuring that the FIR is filed under the optimal section combination and supported by evidence in a format that Cyber Cells can use effectively.

AI-Written False Articles and Defamation: The Legal Analysis

AI text generation tools — large language models such as GPT-family models, Gemini, and others — can produce false articles, social media posts, and review content that read as authentic human writing. When such content is published to make false defamatory imputations about a person or business, it is actionable defamation under BNS s.356 regardless of whether a human or an AI tool produced the text. The question of authorship for liability purposes focuses on the person who prompted, edited, and published the content — not the tool used to generate it.

AI-written false articles create a specific challenge for attribution: the writing style does not carry human fingerprints that enable forensic authorship analysis. However, the platform on which the article is published — whether a website, a Medium post, a blog, or a social media account — retains account registration metadata that enables identification of the account holder through legal process. The mechanism for identifying the author of an AI-written defamatory article is therefore the same as for any other anonymously published defamatory content: court-ordered platform disclosure of account registration details.

The volume capability of AI text generation creates a distinct risk: a single motivated bad actor can produce and publish hundreds of variations of the same false allegation across multiple platforms simultaneously, creating an artificial impression of widespread consensus about the defamatory content. This tactic is particularly damaging for businesses and public figures because search engines may index multiple AI-generated articles supporting the same false claim, making the false narrative appear well-documented. The legal response must address both the individual publications (through IT Act notices and court orders) and the systematic pattern (which may support a more significant damages claim and criminal conspiracy argument).

AI-generated content that incorporates a real person's name or likeness in a defamatory context may also engage trade mark law (if the person's name is a registered trade mark), personality rights under Indian common law (developed through cases in the Delhi and Bombay High Courts), and the DPDPA where the content involves personal data. A comprehensive legal response to AI-written defamation should consider all applicable grounds, not only the core defamation claim.

MEITY Advisories and Platform Obligations

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has issued explicit advisories to platforms requiring them to ensure that AI-generated content that impersonates individuals is removed promptly and that platforms implement mechanisms to label AI-generated content. The advisories preceded the February 2026 amendment, which now writes the synthetic-content duties into the Rules themselves; the advisories alone did not have statutory force.

Platforms that continue to host AI-generated defamatory content after receiving a court order or a government direction — the actual knowledge that Shreya Singhal requires — lose their Section 79 safe harbour protection and may be held liable as publishers. In the deepfake context, courts have been willing to pass urgent interim orders given the specific and severe nature of the harm, as the Bombay High Court did in the Gadkari matter.

The MEITY advisory framework, while not having full statutory force as regulations, establishes the regulatory expectation against which platform conduct is assessed. A platform that has received a MEITY advisory about deepfakes and has not implemented reasonable detection or removal mechanisms, and that then fails to act promptly on a specific deepfake complaint, faces a stronger argument that it is not entitled to Section 79 safe harbour protection.

Platforms have responded to MEITY advisories with varying degrees of compliance. Major platforms — Google, Meta, YouTube — have implemented advisory-driven changes to their deepfake detection and removal policies for India. Smaller platforms operating in India are less consistent. The regulatory enforcement of MEITY advisories is an evolving area, and RepuLex monitors regulatory developments to ensure its legal notice strategies reflect current compliance expectations.

What Indian Courts Have Said About Deepfake Defamation (2024–2026)

Indian courts have increasingly encountered deepfake defamation cases since 2024. The emerging jurisprudence reflects a clear judicial recognition of the severity of the harm and a willingness to grant urgent ex parte relief in appropriate cases. The Delhi High Court has granted interim injunctions against AI-generated misuse of a person's likeness in a line of personality-rights suits, beginning with Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023).

Courts have applied the existing framework of defamation law, IT Act provisions, and privacy rights to deepfake facts without requiring new legislation. The principle that has emerged most clearly is that the technological novelty of AI generation does not change the legal character of the content — defamatory AI-generated content is defamation, privacy-violating synthetic imagery is a privacy violation, and identity-theft-by-deepfake is identity theft. The statutory provisions are applied to the new fact patterns by extending established interpretive principles.

On platform liability, the position follows Shreya Singhal: a platform loses Section 79 protection for content it fails to remove after a court order or a government direction, and under Rule 7 where it fails to observe the Rules' due diligence, including the synthetic-content duties added in February 2026. The Bombay High Court's order in the Gadkari matter directed Meta, X, Google and YouTube to take down the listed content and to act on further URLs the plaintiff notifies.

The position as of 2026 is that the legal framework for deepfake defamation is functional but still developing. Damages jurisprudence — how courts will quantify harm from AI-generated defamation — is at an early stage. Criminal prosecution outcomes are limited. The right to be forgotten arguments in deepfake contexts have not yet been fully tested in the Supreme Court. RepuLex advises clients to engage now with legal remedies that are clearly available, while monitoring emerging case law for additional grounds as it develops.

Political deepfakes: the election-period route

Political deepfakes are the fastest-growing case in this category, and the courts have begun to deal with them on the model this article describes. On 5 August 2026 Justice Arif Doctor of the Bombay High Court granted ad interim relief in a civil suit by Union Minister Nitin Gadkari against Meta, X, Google and YouTube, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Department of Telecommunications and unidentified account holders, over AI-generated clips and images falsely tying him and his family to the E20 ethanol-blending programme. As reported by Bar & Bench and MediaNama, the court called the material "vile and abusive", directed the platforms to take down the listed content, to act on further URLs the plaintiff notifies and to disclose the account data of those who posted it, and asked why intermediaries needed a court before acting. The order is interim and the suit continues, but the shape is the one to copy: a civil suit for defamation, John Doe defendants, a takedown direction and a disclosure direction in one application.

During an election period a second route exists. On 6 May 2024 the Election Commission of India directed political parties and their representatives to refrain from publishing or circulating deepfake audio and video or false and misleading information, to remove any such content within three hours of it being brought to their notice, to warn the person responsible within the party, to report unlawful information and fake accounts to the platform concerned, and to escalate persistent issues to the Grievance Appellate Committee under the IT Rules 2021. The Commission reminded parties that the IT Act 2000, the IT Rules 2021, the Indian Penal Code (now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita), the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951 and the Model Code of Conduct already apply. The direction binds parties rather than platforms, so it works alongside the platform complaint and the court order rather than replacing them.

Election law adds a consequence of its own. Section 123(4) of the Representation of the People Act 1951 makes it a corrupt practice for a candidate, an election agent or anyone acting with the candidate's consent to publish a statement of fact that is false, which the publisher believes to be false or does not believe to be true, about the personal character or conduct of a candidate, where it is reasonably calculated to prejudice that candidate's prospects. A deepfake that puts fabricated words or conduct in a rival's mouth is a statement of fact of exactly that kind. A corrupt practice is a ground for an election petition after the result, not a takedown tool during the campaign, so removal still runs on the ordinary routes: a deepfake that impersonates the candidate is a Rule 3(2)(b) complaint the platform must act on within two hours, a false story that impersonates no one is a defamation grievance resolved within seven days, and a court order binds the platform within three hours under Rule 3(1)(d).

Two limits apply whoever the target is. Sexualised or intimate deepfakes of a politician, a candidate or anyone else go on the two-hour route set out in the deepfake and morphed photo removal guide, not on this one. And RepuLex does not take on any matter in which the person depicted is a minor: that is child sexual abuse material, and the only route is the police and the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal.

What Victims Should Do Immediately

Document the content immediately with timestamped screenshots and video capture of the defamatory content in its original context. Do not wait for the content to gain wider distribution — every hour matters in a viral scenario. File a police complaint immediately under the applicable BNS and IT Act sections; the FIR number is a powerful tool for securing platform compliance.

Engage specialist legal counsel to issue simultaneous IT Act notices (to the platform's Grievance Officer), DMCA notices (where the platform is US-hosted and the complainant owns copyright in the source images), and if necessary, file an urgent ex parte application in the competent civil court. The multi-track approach achieves the fastest possible removal while creating a legal record for subsequent civil and criminal proceedings.

Preserve technical evidence before it disappears. Download the deepfake file itself (not just a screenshot) where accessible. Note the exact URL, the account name and handle of the poster, the view count and share statistics (which affect the damages calculation), and any comments or interactions that indicate the spread. If the content has been shared to private channels such as WhatsApp or email, document those instances through witness evidence.

Consider a public factual correction — not a rebuttal of the false content (which amplifies it), but a simple factual statement that the content is AI-generated and false, published through authoritative channels (your own website, a verified social media account, a statement to relevant media). This does not substitute for legal action but provides a parallel record of your response and gives platforms additional context when processing your removal request.