Indian social media laws strict, can't go beyond: Elon Musk

Social media laws in India are quite strict and Twitter can't go beyond the laws of the country, Elon Musk, chief of the American social media company, said on Wednesday.

Being compliant with India's laws is better than having employees go to jail, Musk said, while talking in the context of taking down posts related to the BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But Musk said he was not aware of “this particular situation” about the documentary.

“…don't know what exactly happened with some content situation in India," he said in an interview with the BBC, broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, when asked if the site took down some content at the behest of the Indian government.


In January, the government had ordered Twitter to block more than 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary.

"If we have a choice of either our people going to prison or us complying with the laws, we will comply with the laws," Musk said.

While the BBC had not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels.

In the past, Twitter has been asked to take down tweets supportive of an independent Sikh state, posts alleged to have spread misinformation about protests by farmers and those critical of the government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the BBC interview, Musk said Twitter (now absorbed by X Corp) was roughly breaking even now.

He attributed a decline in revenue to lower, especially political, ad spending. He said most advertisers had however returned now.

To a question on whether he regretted buying Twitter, Musk said the pain level had been extremely high and that this hadn’t been "a party". He acknowledged that there were many mistakes made along the way. But the social media company is "headed to a good place" and all's well that ends well, he added.

Musk said the company has around 1,500 employees compared with 7,000 prior to his taking over. There was a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and the company had money for only four months to live when he took over it, he said.

By April 20, all legacy verified blue ticks will be removed from Twitter, he said. He cautioned that with things like artificial intelligence around, any social media company that didn’t have paid-for verification would incur issues. Musk said even though a US ban looming over TikTok would help Twitter, he was generally against banning things.

Musk, also the chief of SpaceX and Tesla, said the world needed an easy interface for artificial intelligence that chatbot ChatGPT had provided.