India Gives GitHub Three Hours to Remove Jack Dorsey's Bitchat, Citing Protest Coordination Risk

TechCrunch (corroborated by The Hindu, The Tribune, Crypto Times)·high signal

India's Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) issued an order dated July 23, 2026 directing Microsoft-owned GitHub to take down Bitchat, the Bluetooth Low Energy mesh messenger, with a three-hour compliance window. Jack Dorsey made the notice public by posting it to X, saying 'The Government of India does not like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down.' The order cites risk that decentralized platforms enable unlawful assembly, misinformation, and radicalization; the trigger appears to be a spike in Bitchat downloads during student demonstrations at Jantar Mantar in Delhi over alleged exam leaks. The precedent that matters to builders is jurisdictional: this is a takedown demand aimed at source code on a hosting platform, not at an app-store listing.