The Twitter handles of Indian information broadcaster NDTV (New Delhi Television) and information company ANI have been locked briefly and restored after a number of hours on Saturday.

Smita Prakash, editor of ANI tweeted a screenshot of the deal with of the company being locked on Saturday night.

“So those who follow @ANI bad news, @Twitter has locked out India’s largest news agency which has 7.6 million followers and sent this mail – under 13 years of age! Our gold tick was taken away, substituted with a blue tick and now locked out,” Ms Prakash tweeted, tagging Elon Musk.

Ms Prakash’s screenshot included a message from Twitter that mentioned that the account had been locked out because it “did not meet the age requirements“ required to be on the platform and would be removed.

Shortly after, broadcaster NDTV tweeted from the handle of its Hindi news channel that the Twitter account of its English news counterpart had been locked.

Tagging Mr Musk, NDTV India tweeted: “Twitter has blocked @ndtv (India’s most-followed English news handle). The account has been run by journalists since 2009. Please help restore it. Many thanks, Team NDTV.”

An fast cause for the suspension of the 2 accounts was not given.

Both accounts gave the impression to be restored shortly afterwards.

International media accounts together with US’ National Public Radio (NPR) and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had stopped posting to their Twitter accounts earlier this month after the social media platform labelled them “Government-funded.”

Earlier this month, the BBC had objected to an identical label on its primary Twitter account. The labels have been later dropped.

Neither NDTV nor ANI are government-funded.

Last 12 months, NDTV was acquired by billionaire Gautam Adani resulting in speculations about the way forward for one of many nation’s final bastions of free media.

ANI can also be listed as a non-public firm.

Neither is thought to have any funding from the federal government.

Earlier this week, Twitter mentioned that India was among the many prime nations that had requested the platform to take away content material final 12 months.

It mentioned on Tuesday that it acquired roughly 53,000 authorized requests to take away content material from governments throughout the globe from 1 January to 30 June 2022.

Japan, South Korea, Turkey and India — which topped these requests — requested, in line with The Economic Times.

The social media platform which was bought by Mr Musk in 2022 for $44bn has seen widespread changes since his takeover.

In January, Twitter had mentioned accounts will solely be suspended for extreme or ongoing and repeated violations of the platform’s insurance policies.

It added that such suspensions might nevertheless be topic to attraction.

(Additional reporting by businesses)