Delhi HC asks Google to remove misleading and deepfake content on Sadhguru

The Delhi High Court has asked search engine Google LLC to make an endeavour to ensure that misleading and deepfake content infringing the personality rights of Isha Foundation's Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev are removed and similar material is taken down through its technology.

The high court directed Google and Sadhguru to have a mutual meeting, where he can specifically identify the contents that fall within the exception of the Google Ads policy under which they cannot be removed, after the counsel for the company submitted that it was willing to have a collaborative approach with him to address concerns.

"...thereafter, defendant no. 45 (Google) must make an endeavour to ensure that the identical or similar content is removed through its technology so as to obviate the plaintiff's (Sadhguru) onus of looking out for such URLs and further to obviate the necessity of the plaintiff making an endeavour to identify such misleading representation and approaching defendant no. 45 for take down," the court said in its October 14 order.

The court said if Google has any technological limitations or reservations on this direction, it can take instructions and file an affidavit.

The counsel for Sadhguru said in view of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, Google ought to endeavour to bring in place a technology, which identifies identical content to obviate the necessity of the plaintiff to repeatedly approach the defendant for the taking down of identical content.

To this, the counsel for Google submitted that it was willing to have a collaborative approach with the plaintiff to address their concerns and would actively cooperate in taking down any further links pointed out to them.

Earlier, Sadhguru and Isha Foundation approached the high court seeking protection of their personality rights and to direct various channels and social media intermediaries to remove fake and misleading videos, posts and advertisements.

In its May order, the high court had passed an interim order granting protection to Sadhguru's personality rights and directed Google to suspend, take down, and disable such infringing channels and content.