Microblogging site Twitter owned by Elon Musk on Saturday locked ANI’s Twitter account and barred the agency from using it for at least five hours. ANI owner Smita Prakash took to Twitter to share the news. Although Twitter later restored ANI’s account but the agency’s gold tick was taken away.
Prakash tagged Elon Musk as she wrote on Twitter, “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 blue tick and now locked out.”
Prakash also shared a screenshot of a message that she had received from Twitter stating the reason for locking out ANI’s account. The message from Twitter read, “In order to create a Twitter account, you must be at least 13 years old. Twitter has determined that you don’t meet these age requirements. So your account has been locked and will be removed from Twitter.”
Hours later, ANI informed on Twitter that its account had been restored. It tweeted, “ANI’s Twitter account appears to be functioning now. Inconvenience regretted for the temporary outage.”
However, ANI’s gold tick had vanished and it was replaced with a blue tick, which is given the subscribers of Twitter Blue for a monthly fee of $8. Musk recently also expanded his service to accounts with more than one million followers after many celebrities and organisations refused to pay $8 for retaining their blue ticks.