Delhi High Court orders AAP's AI videos of CM Rekha Gupta taken down, saying deepfakes are not satire

The Delhi High Court on Friday, 6 November 2026, ordered the takedown of AI generated videos and images of Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta that were posted from the official social media accounts of the Aam Aadmi Party, The Hindu and The Indian Express reported. Justice Manoj Jain passed the order in a defamation suit Gupta filed against AAP and others, with X Corp and Meta Platforms named among the defendants, according to the Express.

According to her plea, the posts showed the Chief Minister as a liquor vendor, a hawker and a delivery agent, and as the head of a made up scheme called "Har Har Rekha or Ghar Ghar Theka Yojana". One deepfake clip showed her and Deputy Chief Minister Parvesh Sahib Singh pouring liquor and ice cubes. The court noted that one of the videos, posted on X on 4 November, had about 75,000 views, 1,600 likes and 470 reposts when it was captured as a screenshot, The Hindu reported.

The judge found a preliminary case in Gupta's favour and directed that six posts be removed, one on Facebook and five on X, the Express reported, and LiveLaw reported that the takedown direction covered the six URLs listed in the plaint. The court said healthy criticism and satire would not raise eyebrows, but that these AI videos had clearly breached the dividing line by being defamatory and attacking the dignity of a woman holding constitutional office. Referring to earlier rulings including the Raghav Chadha case, it said that until a law specifically regulates AI generated content, courts have a duty to check whether such content infringes a person's right to dignity, according to The Hindu.

The case lands nine months after MeitY amended the IT Rules to bring synthetically generated content, including deepfakes, inside platforms' due diligence duties. Those amendments, in force since 20 February 2026, require labels and provenance markers on permitted synthetic media and cut some takedown timelines to as little as three hours, MediaNama reported. Gupta's suit, though, was a defamation action decided by a court rather than a complaint under those rules.

Summons have gone to all defendants, including AAP, and the matter is listed again on 4 December, The Hindu reported. Delhi government officials called the order historic, the Express said. For bharat.digital readers, the thing to watch is whether courts and platforms start treating realistic political deepfakes as a fast takedown category on their own, or keep handling them one defamation suit at a time.