India's social media rules quite strict: Elon Musk

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Wednesday said that the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict.

Musk said this in an interview with the BBC when he was asked whether the microblogging platform took down content related to a documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the behest of the Indian government.

"If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we'll comply with the laws," the billionaire said. "We can't go beyond the laws of a country," he added.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October last year. The takeover concluded after a long legal battle, which saw many flip-flops by Musk, forcing Twitter to move court against him. The Tesla CEO had first proposed to buy out Twitter in April 2022. Musk later tried to back out of the deal, citing Twitter's inability to provide data on spam or fake accounts on its platform.

When asked whether he would sell the platform to someone who offers $44 billion, Musk said it depends on the buyer. "I suppose if I was confident that they would rigorously pursue the truth, then I guess I would be glad to hand it off to someone else. I don't care about the money, really, but I do want to have some source of truth that I can count on," he said.

The Tesla CEO said that running Twitter has been "quite painful". "It's been quite difficult. I'd say the pain level of Twitter has been extremely high. This hasn't been some sort of party, so it's been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months," Musk said.

He, however, added that Twitter is headed to a "good place". "We're roughly breakeven, I think we're trending towards being cash flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months. The advertisers are returning. I think the quality of recommended tweets has improved significantly, and we've taken a lot of feedback from people that have looked at the open source recommendation algorithm, and we've made a lot of improvements even since that was made open source and we're going to keep doing that. So overall, I think the trend is very good," he said.

Musk also admitted that he only went through with the acquisition because a U.S. court was about to force him to buy Twitter.

On Tuesday, Musk announced a fresh deadline for the removal of legacy blue checkmarks on the social media platform. The final date for removing the legacy Blue checkmark will now be April 20, 2023, Musk said.