The Supreme Court on Friday said the issue of linking of social media profiles with Aadhaar needs to be decided at the earliest.

A bench of justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose said "at this stage we do not know whether we could decide this issue or the high court will decide".

The bench further said it will not go into the merits of the case and would simply decide the transfer petition filed by Facebook seeking transfer of such cases pending before the high courts of Madras, Bombay and Madhya Pradesh to the top court.

The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that Facebook and other social media organisations were not abiding by Indian laws, leading to an increase in lawlessness and difficulties in solving crimes

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, told the bench that it has no objection to transfer the cases from high courts to the top court.

The court has ordered for listing of all applications on September 24.

Two writ petitions were filed in the Madras high court in July 2018, praying for the interlinking of Aadhaar with social media accounts for identity authentication purposes. The court then expanded the petition to include issues like ‘curbing cybercrime and intermediary liability’ in the proceedings.

The Tamil Nadu government had told the Supreme Court in August that social media profiles of users need to be linked with Aadhaar to check the circulation of fake, defamatory, anti-national, terror-related and pornographic content.

Facebook had responded that sharing of the Aadhaar would violate users’ privacy. The company said it cannot share the Aadhaar number with a third party as the content on its messaging platform WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted.