NEW YORK-
Twitter.com blocked five links to ‘blasphemous content’ in Pakistan on request of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), a first in the history of the online social networking website according to a report by New York Times.
In the month of May, Abdul Batin; an official of PTA had requested the website to block certain user accounts, tweets and searches considered ‘blasphemous’ or ‘unethical’ to prevent Pakistanis from accessing them.
According to the NYT report, the official had made a total of five requests, calling to block access to drawings of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), photographs of burning copies of the Holy Quran and messages from a handful of anti-Islam bloggers as well as the entire account of an American porn star who now attends Duke University
All five of the requests were honoured by the website using the Country Withheld Content Tool and the mentioned comment can no longer be seen in Pakistan.
This was the first time Twitter has agreed to block content in Pakistan, in line with its country-specific policy of censorship unveiled in 2012. The policy stated that the website will post a notice whenever a tweet was censored and the requests of censorship from governments, companies and individuals will be posted online at chillingeffects.org.
PTA had blocked Twitter for a day in May 2012 due to a drawing competition.
