Censorship – News Media/Documentaries

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.”

A screenshot showing the ‘not available in India’ message on The Wire’s Instagram page.

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.

Under India’s IT law, the ministry is required to inform a publisher in advance that it intends to block content to a particular article or page. The cartoon was posted on Instagram, Facebook and X at 6.30 pm on February 7 and to date, no written communication has been received by The Wire.

On February 10, the cartoon was blocked on X as well, with a message saying instead, “This Post from @thewire_in has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand.”