Bengaluru, July 9 -- The Union government on Tuesday admitted in the Karnataka high court that the Indian Railways misused its statutory powers when it issued a takedown notice to social media platform X over a video showing a woman driving on railway tracks in Telangana. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, however, dismissed it as an "isolated incident" that did not undermine the Sahyog portal's overall objective of streamlining regulation of online intermediaries. The comments were made during arguments over X Corp's petition challenging the government's Sahyog Portal, which the social media platform claims opens doors for "indiscriminate censorship" by allowing countless government officials to issue takedown notices without proper oversight. "Misuse of a provision does not render it unconstitutional," Mehta told a bench of Justice M Nagaprasanna while opposing X Corp's petition. Senior advocate KG Raghavan, representing X, told the court the portal facilitates communication of takedown notices by government officials to social media intermediaries using Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. This provision deals with intermediary liability for third-party content and mandates that platforms can lose their 'safe harbour' protection if they fail to remove unlawful content. Under Section 79, platforms are protected from liability for user content provided they comply with takedown requests within 36 hours of receiving official notice. X argued this provision has been misused to create a parallel blocking mechanism that violates the Supreme Court's judgment in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India, which established a defined process for content removal under the IT Act. Raghavan stressed that Section 79(3)(b) should not be treated as a standalone takedown power but must be read alongside safeguards built into Section 69A, as interpreted in the Supreme Court's Shreya Singhal judgment. The court will hear the case further on July 11. "The problem is that the portal leaves the definition of 'unlawful' content to the discretion of countless government officials," Raghavan argued, citing the Railways notice as an example. He described how X received a notice asking it to remove a viral video of a woman driving on railway tracks. "It made news because the woman drove the car for some seven kilometres on the rail track. Obviously, users shared the video. But how is that video unlawful?" he asked.The incident, he argued, demonstrated how powers under Section 79(3)(b) could be misused arbitrarily without checks....