London | Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday said that the rules governing social media content in India are "quite strict" while asserting that he did not know "what exactly happened" when his microblogging site blocked content related to a controversial BBC documentary.
In an interview with the BBC at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, the billionaire tech tycoon who bought the microblogging platform last October agreed that the firm will change its newly added label for the media corporation's main account from "government funded media" to "publicly-funded".
He was asked about the level of content moderation undertaken with reference to reports from India that several tweets linking to the BBC's two-part 'India: The Modi Question' documentary were blocked from access in the country earlier this year.
"I'm not aware of that particular situation," Musk told the BBC.
Pushed further by the interviewer if that meant he wasn't sure about the activity, he added: "I don't know what exactly happened with some content situation in India. The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can't go beyond the laws of a country." India dismissed the BBC documentary as a "propaganda piece", saying it is designed to push a particular "discredited narrative" and that the continuing colonial mindset is "blatantly visible" in the series.
Asked if that would incentivise countries around the world to pass more draconian laws for social media, the Twitter chief stressed that the social media giant's focus was always on complying with the laws.
Asked about the decision to add a label to the BBC's main Twitter account @BBC describing it as "government funded media", Musk said he knows the BBC “is generally not thrilled about being labelled state media".
Earlier this week, the UK taxpayer-funded licence fee backed media corporation contacted Twitter over the changed designation.
"The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee," it said.
Musk said Twitter was adjusting the label for the BBC to "publicly-funded" to make it “accurate".
"I actually do have a lot of respect for the BBC," he added.
Musk, who also runs carmaker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, acquired Twitter for around USD 44 million – a takeover he admitted during the interview went through because a judge was about to force him to make the purchase.
"It's not been boring. It's been quite a rollercoaster… pain level has been extremely high, this hasn't been some kind of party," he said, as he defended his running of Twitter since the acquisition.
Discussing the finances, the entrepreneur said Twitter is now "roughly breaking even" as most of its advertisers have returned and claimed that cutting the workforce from just under 8,000 at the time he bought the firm to about 1,500 had not been easy.
He admitted he did not fire everybody in person, saying: "It's not possible to talk with that many people face to face." The exit of many of Twitter's engineers since Musk bought the company has raised concerns about the stability of the platform. He acknowledged some glitches, including outages on the site, but said the outages have not been for very long and the site was currently working fine.
In the interview – which was broadcast live via the Twitter Spaces service – Musk was also challenged over misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
