PTA blocks Twitter amid blasphemy threats

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked the social media portal, Twitter, following fears of blasphemy. The government closed the site amid fears that the blasphemous pictures might be circulated on the social media.

The chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Muhammad Yaseen said that the micro-blogging site had been shut down on Sunday after it refused to remove tweets promoting a Facebook page encouraging people to post images of the prophet Muhammad.

Mr Yasin added that Facebook agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns but officials had failed to persuade Twitter to do the same. He said, “We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it.”

However, as usual, many users used installed proxy servers to shield their web browsing. The ban was made largely irrelevant by tech-savvy users,as many of them posted angry tweets about the shutdown after the site came back online.

Farieha Aziz, of the Bolo Bhi advocacy group, said the government was repeating the mistake of 2010, when Facebook was blocked for two weeks because of a group page called Everybody Draw Mohammed. Although there had been protests in the runup to the event last year, Aziz said the ban gave the group more publicity, particularly in Islamic countries outside Pakistan.

“This year, however, everyone had been completely oblivious to this,” she added. “Shutting down Twitter will just drive more traffic to them.”

According to the government, about 20% of Pakistan’s 180 million people have access to the internet, while 64% have connections through their mobile phone.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=24284

Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on May 26 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.