Meanwhile, the MeitY on Sunday had said that “There is no requirement from the Government of India to withhold the Reuters handle. We are continuously working with X to resolve the problem.”
| Photo Credit:
Dado Ruvic
Micro-blogging site X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday said that on July 3, 2025, the Indian government ordered it to block 2,355 accounts in India, including international news outlets like @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, under, Section 69A of the IT Act.
“The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MietY) demanded immediate action — within one hour — without providing justification, and required the accounts to remain blocked until further notice,” it said in a statement.
However, after a public outcry, the government requested X to unblock @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, it added.
“We are deeply concerned about ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders. X is exploring all legal options available. Unlike users located in India, X is restricted by Indian law in its ability to bring legal challenges against these executive orders. We urge affected users to pursue legal remedies through the courts,” the Elon Musk owned company said in a post.
In May also, over 8,000 accounts, most of them Pakistani apparently, were withheld in India at the behest of MeitY. Some of them belonged to Indian entities, including those of New Delhi-based news portal Maktoob News, Srinagar-based journalist Anuradha Bhasin, and political content creator Arpit Sharma.
News portal ‘The Wire’, whose account was also blocked, said the move was “a clear violation of the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press,” and termed it an arbitrary and inexplicable move.
“We protest this blatant censorship at a critical time for India when sane, truthful, fair and rational voices and sources of news and information are among the biggest assets that India has,” The Wire said.
But, X has now officially announced that the Indian Government had indeed asked the site to block the said number (2,355) of accounts in India, including those of international news outlets @Reuters and @ReutersWorld.
Meanwhile, Rajya Sabha MP from All India Trinamool Congress Sagarika Ghose in a post on X said, “Govt caught lying yet again – said they had not blocked @Reuters. Now X says clearly GoI ordered it to block without justification. Shameless.”
The Government has not issued any fresh blocking order on 3rd July, 2025 and has no intention to block any prominent international News Channels including Reuters and ReutersWorld. The moment Reuters and ReutersWorld were blocked on X platform in India, immediately the government wrote to ‘X’ to unblock them. The Government continuously engaged and vigorously pursued with ‘X’ from the late night of 5th July 2025. ‘X’ has un-necessarily exploited technicalities involved around the process and didn’t unblock the URLs. However, after lot of follow up on hourly basis, X has finally unblocked Reuters and other URLs after 9 pm on 6th July 2025. They took more than 21 hours to unblock Reuters, said an Official Spokesperson(MeitY)
Published on July 8, 2025
