A farmer in a district few outside her state could name records a short video in her own language — about a seed price, a scheme that has not reached her village, a question she wants answered. She posts it. Almost no one sees it. She does not know why. There is no notice, no reason, no one to ask. The post is still there, technically. Its purpose has quietly been defeated.

Multiply that moment across millions of rural users, and you begin to see why the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India has taken a step it did not take lightly. On 23 July 2026, CNRI — an organisation in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council — submitted a formal communication under the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council. It concerns the algorithmic recommendation systems, automated moderation and platform-governance practices of three of the largest digital enterprises operating in India: Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Alphabet (Google Search and YouTube), and X Corp.

I want to be precise about what this communication is, and what it is not.

It is not a demand that any company be presumed guilty. We have deliberately framed our submission as a set of questions rather than a set of accusations. We ask the platforms to disclose what they ordinarily know in the course of running their services: whether the reach of rural and agricultural accounts changed, and why; whether content was down-ranked or excluded from recommendation surfaces; what human rights due diligence they have conducted; and whether they will preserve the relevant records. An institution confident in its own conduct should have little difficulty answering.

What the communication is, is an argument that the public square has moved — and that the rules have not moved with it.

For rural India, a handful of platforms have become the indispensable gateway to information, markets and civic participation. There is no equivalent alternative offering comparable reach. When a private company’s ranking system decides what a farmer sees, or whether a cooperative’s message travels beyond its own followers, that company is exercising a form of regulatory authority over public discourse — without the transparency, the appeal rights or the accountability we would demand of any public body wielding comparable power. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the very absence of an alternative raises the standard of responsibility these enterprises owe. Scale is not a defence. It is the reason for heightened care.

Our concern falls hardest on those already at the margins. The communities we work with speak Indian languages other than English. Many have limited digital literacy and no access to legal advice. When moderation systems perform less accurately in regional languages, when appeal mechanisms are built as English-language, self-service interfaces, the result is a two-tier digital citizenship: full participation for some, diminished visibility and unusable remedies for others. International human rights law has long recognised that discrimination need not be intentional to be real — a facially neutral system that produces unjustified, disparate harm on a protected group engages the principles of equality just the same. This is the substance of what we describe, plainly, as a digital apartheid of reach: not a claim of malice, but a description of a lived, measurable inequality in whose voice carries.

The rights at stake are not abstract. The freedom of expression protected under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes the freedom to receive information, not only to publish it. When distribution is throttled without notice or stated basis, the villager who never sees the post is as much affected as the organisation that sent it. Article 27 protects the right of linguistic minorities to use their own language. And the Guiding Principles insist that a grievance mechanism is only meaningful if it is genuinely accessible — an appeal process that an affected person cannot understand or navigate is a remedy in name only.

So we have asked the mandate holders to do a specific set of things. To transmit our questions to the companies and invite their response. To ask the Government of India, as the State concerned, to reflect on whether the domestic framework governing platform ranking and moderation is adequate, and whether affected users have any real route to redress. To request that the platforms preserve their records — recommendation logs, moderation decisions, appeal correspondence, integrity assessments — pending any inquiry. And to consider whether an independent, credible assessment of these algorithmic systems is warranted, so that the public is no longer asked to take opacity on trust.

We have also been careful about our own house. Every allegation we advance is tied to evidence we hold. Where individuals have agreed to be identified, they have given informed, written consent, knowing the communication will be shared with the State and the companies named. We name corporate entities, not officers or individuals. This discipline matters: a case for accountability that is itself careless loses the standing to demand rigour of others.

Let me be clear about what this is not, either. It is not an argument against technology, against connectivity, or against the immense good these platforms have brought to rural India. It is not an argument for a closed or censored internet. It is the opposite. It is a demand that the open, plural, participatory promise of the digital commons be extended to the people most often left outside it — the woman farmer, the cooperative organiser, the young person in a small town posting in a language the algorithm was never carefully trained to read.

The question at the heart of our communication is simple, and it is one every society mediated by these systems will eventually have to answer: when a small number of private companies decide who is heard, to whom do they answer? For the villages we represent, the answer at present is: no one they can reach. We have asked the United Nations to help change that.

CNRI stands ready to provide the underlying evidence in full, to facilitate contact with those who have consented, and to contribute to any consultation the mandate holders may undertake. This is submitted in the spirit of cooperation, not confrontation — because a public square that works for rural India is not a threat to anyone. It is the whole point.

The Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) is a federation of civil society organisations working on rural development, agriculture and cooperative economics across India, in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.