For years, a committee of executives from U.S. technology companies and Indian officials convened every two weeks in a government office to negotiate what could and could not be said on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. At the “69A meetings,” as the secretive gatherings were informally called, officials from India’s information, technology, security, and intelligence agencies presented social media posts they wanted removed. The tech representatives sometimes pushed back in the name of free speech. One company resisted the most: Twitter. New regulations had been adopted that year to hold tech employees in India criminally liable for failing to comply with takedown requests, a provision that executives referred to as a “hostage provision.” In the past two years, the Indian government has dramatically tightened its grip on American social media companies. This escalating censorship in the world’s largest democracy is part of a wider campaign by India.