New Delhi: The Wire’s Instagram account was blocked in India for nearly two hours this evening (February 9, Monday).
The Instagram account, with over 1.3 million followers, is one of the most popular and widely followed social media handles for news, views, analysis, humour and satire online.
Readers who opened The Wire’s main Instagram page on Monday evening were greeted with a terse message saying the account was “not available in India … because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content.”
Those with access to VPN or outside the borders of India were able to access the account.
When contacted, officials in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) told The Wire, “We have not blocked your account”.
The Wire has learned informally that the ministry asked Meta to block a 52-second satirical cartoon on Instagram and that the social media giant blocked the entire Instagram handle of The Wire ‘in error’. As of 8:30 pm, access to the main account was restored but the cartoon remained inaccessible. Facebook, where the cartoon has also been posted, has also blocked access to that specific cartoon in India.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
