People in India who use X couldn’t get into the main Reuters news account or the Reuters World account on Saturday night.
After that, access was restored on Sunday.
“The @Reuters account, which has 25 million followers, has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand,” according to Reuters. Users in India who tried to access the account saw this message instead.
Reuters, on the other hand, did not have to hide its handle, according to a spokesman for the Indian government who spoke to TechCrunch. We’re working with X all the time to solve the problem.
Someone from Reuters said that the news organization is “working with X to solve this problem.” Reuters’s social media team also got a message from X in May saying that the company was hiding content at the request of the Indian government. The message didn’t say which agency made the request or what content was being hidden, though.
The company that used to be Twitter and was recently combined with another Elon Musk business, xAI, has criticized the Indian government for asking it to block certain accounts and posts.
In March, it even sued the government, saying that a new website provides “unrestrained censorship of information in India” by letting “countless” public workers remove content or block accounts without following the law. The government said the website only lets them tell businesses about dangerous content online.
X also had a long fight with Brazil’s Supreme Court last year, which caused the service to be shut down in Brazil and banned for over a month.
TechCrunch asked X for a reaction, but they didn’t answer immediately. TechCrunch asked Reuters more questions about how it talked to the Indian government and X, but the company didn’t answer immediately.
The post has been changed to show that the Reuters accounts are back up and running.
