The Global Government Affairs account of X (formerly known as Twitter) was reinstated after being temporarily withheld in India on Friday morning for some time. The Elon Musk-owned platform’s Global Government Affairs account had on Thursday night put out post stating that India has asked it to block 8,000 accounts.
X has received executive orders from the Indian government requiring X to block over 8,000 accounts in India, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment of the company’s local employees. The orders include demands to block access in India to…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) May 8, 2025
Users in India could not see any posts in the timeline on Friday morning for some time and account’s page stated that the @GlobalAffairs account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand. This is the handle that X regularly uses to update users on blocking orders received from various governments. However, some time later, the account was reinstated, and was visible to Indian users.
On Thursday night the Global Affairs account of X stated that it has received executive orders from the Indian government requiring it to block over 8,000 accounts in India. It said this was subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment of the company’s local employees.
“The orders include demands to block access in India to accounts belonging to international news organizations and prominent X users. In most cases, the Indian government has not specified which posts from an account have violated India’s local laws. For a significant number of accounts, we did not receive any evidence or justification to block the accounts,” it added.
The platform said that to comply with the orders, it has begun the process of withholding the specified accounts in India alone but that it disagrees with Indian governmnet’s demands and beleivs blocking entire acounts is unnecessary.
“We believe that making these executive orders public is essential for transparency – lack of disclosure discourages accountability and can contribute to arbitrary decision making. However, due to legal restrictions, we are unable to publish the executive orders at this time,” the account’s post had stated.
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Published on May 9, 2025