The government rowed back on Tuesday from demands that text messages containing nearly 1,700 “obscene” words should be blocked, following outrage from users and campaigners.
On November 14, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) distributed a list of 1,695 words in English and Urdu, the national language, to operators, giving them seven days to implement a filtering system. But the list was met with uproar, both at the attempt to censor messages and the inclusion of many seemingly innocuous terms, among them “Jesus Christ”, “lotion”, “athlete’s foot”, “robber”, “idiot”, “four twenty” and “harder”. On Tuesday, PTA spokesman Mohammad Younis Khan told AFP the authority would consult civil society representatives and mobile phone operators on refining a much shorter list of words, giving no timeframe for any eventual ban.
“At the moment we are not blocking or filtering any word,” Khan said. “No final decision has been taken in this regard,” he added. A PTA committee with representatives of civil society and mobile phone operators will decide on a “final list of objectionable words” which Khan conceded could be only around “a dozen”. “We have no plan to block any word until and unless it is approved by that committee and it will take time to reach that decision,” he added. A letter accompanying the list on November 14 said filtering was legal under the Pakistan Telecommunication Act of 1996.