It has been reported, in a major event, that X (previously Twitter) has been prohibited in Pakistan because it did not adhere to local standards.
X (previously Twitter) only censored a small portion of the information that was detected, failing to appropriately address the issue of unlawful content.
Twitter apparently received over 67,000 links from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) for filtering; however, only a portion of those connections were blocked by the social media network. Moreover, officials felt that Twitter’s response to blasphemous content was insufficient.
This action comes after Twitter was repeatedly warned to abide by Pakistani legislation, with explicit orders to ban information that broke the rules.
PTA has previously reported Twitter’s noncompliance to the Ministry of Information Technology, urging stringent actions such as platform suspension and heavy penalties.
After more than ten days, Pakistan’s social networking platform X has been disrupted for an extended period of time, raising serious concerns about the nation’s freedom of speech and access to digital communication. As of February 27, users in Pakistan are still unable to access X, which was blocked on February 17.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) have been popular among Pakistani social media users as a workaround to access X (Twitter) during the outage. But reports have surfaced indicating that government efforts to obstruct VPNs are making it more difficult for users to get around the limitations, which is making the internet community even more irate.
Following the general elections on February 8, Liaquat Ali Chatta, the former chief commissioner of Rawalpindi, raised accusations of anomalies in the voting process, which led to the first Twitter shutdown in Pakistan.
The Sindh High Court (SHC) issued directions last Thursday, requesting officials to maintain uninterrupted service statewide and restore access to social networking platform X in an attempt to fix the issue.
But even with the court’s rulings, implementation is still difficult to come by, which prolongs the time that users are unable to access certain resources and exacerbates worries about digital rights.
