The Wire’s Instagram Account Blocked for Two Hours Over Cartoon Critical of Modi

“Confusion” allegedly led to blocking the account followed by 1.3 million people, as the target was one satirical video toon. The cartoon was later blocked on X as well.

The Wire Staff

“Confusion” allegedly led to blocking the account followed by 1.3 million people, as the target was one satirical video toon. The cartoon was later blocked on X as well.

the wire’s instagram account blocked for two hours over cartoon critical of modi

A screengrab from the blocked cartoon video.

New Delhi: The Wire’s Instagram account was blocked in India for nearly two hours this evening (February 9, Monday).

The Instagram account, with over 1.3 million followers, is one of the most popular and widely followed social media handles for news, views, analysis, humour and satire online.

Readers who opened The Wire’s main Instagram page on Monday evening were greeted with a terse message saying the account was “not available in India … because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content."

A screenshot showing the 'not available in India' message on The Wire's Instagram page.

Those with access to VPN or outside the borders of India were able to access the account.

When contacted, officials in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) told The Wire, “We have not blocked your account”.

The Wire has learned informally that the⁠ ministry asked Meta to block a 52-second satirical cartoon on Instagram and that the social media giant blocked the entire Instagram handle of The Wire ‘in error’. As of 8:30 pm, access to the main account was restored but the cartoon remained inaccessible. Facebook, where the cartoon has also been posted, has also blocked access to that specific cartoon in India.

Under India’s IT law, the ministry is required to inform a publisher in advance that it intends to block content to a particular article or page. The cartoon was posted on Instagram, Facebook and X at 6.30 pm on February 7 and to date, no written communication has been received by The Wire.

On February 10, the cartoon was blocked on X as well, with a message saying instead, "This Post from @thewire_in has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand."

An embedded video of it is still available on X. You can also see the satirical cartoon here on YouTube and here on BlueSky.

In May 2025, The Wire’s website was arbitrarily blocked for a whole day. The Ministry subsequently ordered the deletion of a story reporting what CNN had said about Pakistan’s claim to have shot down an Indian Rafale jet during Operation Sindoor as a condition for restoring access.

The Ministry’s email, received at 9:41 pm on May 9, 2025 had said that thewire.in was blocked based on blocking request it had received regarding the article on this webpage.

The letter said that thewire.in was blocked due to the technical limitation that in the case of https websites, only full domains can be blocked, and sub-pages cannot be blocked. It added that The Wire was requested to take appropriate action regarding that content and “inform the action taken, which would enable the Ministry to unblock the website.”

The Wire has written to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Meta, which owns Instagram to enquire about this random act of taking down a popular, well-regarded and informative site, without any prior information.

This is a developing story and is being updated.

This article went live on February ninth, two thousand twenty six, at ten minutes past nine at night.

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