The Sindh High Court (SHC) has ordered the relevant authorities to guarantee that every citizen has continuous access to the internet through the general elections on February 8.
The high court ordered the respondents to file their answer by January 29 and prohibited the authorities from halting internet services in its judgement on Wednesday.
Jibran Nasir, a human rights activist and advocate, has petitioned the Supreme Court over the nation’s repeated suspension of internet connectivity.
Users have encountered many internet interruptions in the past several days as political canvassing intensifies in anticipation of the elections that will take place next month.
On January 20, there was a second outage of social media sites in two weeks, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) attributed last week’s widespread internet outage to a “technical fault” in its optic fibre network, following an hours-long disruption.
The PTA posted the following on its official X account: “A technical issue that caused a recent outage in internet services has been fixed swiftly. All around the country, internet services have been fully restored.
Google Services and internet service provider PTCL were also affected, according to downdetector.pk.
Research claims that the state’s relationship with media freedoms has gotten worse over the last two years as a result of an increase in censorship incidents, violence against journalists, and official contempt for critical media.
The Institute of Research, Advocacy, and Development (IRADA) released the study “Under Siege: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive Actions Stifling Freedom of Expression and Right to Information” as a part of its yearly status of digital media series.
The PTA blacklisted 1.1 million URLs, including 187 mobile applications, during the evaluation period. According to the study, over 200,000 of these restricted or erased URLs and material were allegedly associated with information that was hateful or sectarian, against Pakistan’s defence or the glory of Islam, or that was in contempt of court.
The study also reveals that the Pakistani government has requested that a large quantity of content be removed from major digital platforms, including Google, Meta, TikTok, and X (previously Twitter). For instance, the report states that Meta blocked access to 12,001 products in Pakistan between January 2021 and June 2022 that the PTA had detected as potentially breaking local regulations.
