Elon Musk’s renaming of Twitter isn’t quite going as planned, since X doesn’t seem to be a popular name for all countries. One of them just suspended the social network nationwide.
Indonesian Internet users will have access to one less social network this week, and it is to Elon Musk that they owe it. Indeed, the country’s regulators claimed they blocked access to Twitter after Musk decided the social media would be rebranded as “X” over the weekend.
Twitter’s old web address, twitter.com, now redirects to x.com, which was previously associated with prohibited content in the country, especially pornography and gambling. It is the second country to put obstacles in the way of Elon Musk. Before him, Japan has already expressed concerns about the change, especially because of a popular rock band in the country that already bears the same name.
X suspension in Indonesia not expected to last
The blocking of X in Indonesia is unlikely to last more than a few days. Usman Kansong, director general of information and public communication at the country’s ministry, said that the government was already in contact with X to clarify the nature of the site. It is therefore more of a formality than a major legal obstacle.
The list of most visited websites starting with X contains many pornographic sites, so it is finally not surprising to see the Indonesian government temporarily block the social network in its country. Compared to other platforms, Twitter remains one of the spaces most open to the proliferation of content that does not conform to good morals, and according to Reuters, around one in eight messages posted on the platform is adult content. However, X today is far from being a porn site.
It has not been possible to independently confirm that x.com has been associated with indecent or obscene material in the past. A search of archived web pages on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine turned up nothing, although The Desk did find a page captured around 2014 that showed the domain was associated with an e-commerce division of eBay. As a reminder, Musk bought the x.com domain name as early as 2000using it for a financial platform that was later franchised to PayPal, and this was later acquired by eBay acquired in 2002.
