Internet censorship in Pakistan

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Internet censorship in Pakistan is due to the governments attempts to control information sent and received using social media and the Internet in Pakistan. Presently, as of February 2024, X (formerly Twitter) is banned, despite the government using the platform to issue official statements.

There have been significant instances of website access restriction in Pakistan, most notably when YouTube was banned/blocked from 2012 to 2016. Pakistan has asked a number of social media organisations to set up local offices within the country, but this is yet to happen.^[1]

Pakistan made global headlines in 2010 for blocking Facebook and other Web sites in response to a contest popularized on the social networking site to draw images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. In general, Internet filtering in Pakistan remains both inconsistent and intermittent, with filtering primarily targeted at content deemed to be a threat to national security, pornography, homosexuality and at religious content considered blasphemous. However, the present banning of Twitter is politically motivated.

In 2019, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecom was informed by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) that 900,000 URLs were blocked in Pakistan for "reasons such as carrying blasphemous and pornographic content and/or sentiments against the state, judiciary or the armed forces." In February 2023, Wikipedia was banned by the PTA for two days over alleged blasphemous content.^[2]