On Saturday night, while most people were out and about, Elon Musk was announcing yet another major change to Twitter: It would soon rebrand as something called “X.” Was it a decision he made impulsively? Maybe not, but the move has been anything but smooth. Musk failed to make certain basic preparations before the shift. That includes checking on whether or not it violated a major rule in a certain country.
As per The Daily Beast, on Tuesday Twitter (or whatever it’s called now) was suddenly banned in Indonesia. Why? Because it’s new domain, X.com, used to belong to a site devoted to adult content. The nation has very strict anti-porn laws, which meant that the 24 million citizens who use Twitter were suddenly locked out.
That probably won’t be permanent. The Indonesian government reportedly reached out to Elon Musk to clarify that X.com will be used for tweeting, not disseminating hardcore material. One reason for the law is that Indonesia has the largest Muslim population on the planet.
Twitter/X isn’t the only major online service to have run afoul of Indonesia’s strict laws. Last year authorities threatened Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Instagram if they didn’t detail what content appeared on their sites. Twitter was also part of the same round-up. Each site managed to comply by their rules.
In the meantime, it could be worse for those currently Twitter-less in the southeast Asian country. They could work at the social media service’s headquarters, where conference rooms have been cringingly renamed to reflect the name change, with such examples as “eXposure” and “s3xy.”
(Via The Daily Beast)