After Twitter Block, Pakistan Files Complaint Against Facebook

By Tech Wire Asia | 23 May, 2012

If you have missed the live action of Pakistan banning Twitter for 24 hours and later restoring the service, then we have another fresh story for you — from the same place, which hits the same spot. Pakistan has now filed a compliant against Facebook and three other sites for posting blasphemous material.

TNW cites Express Tribune about the compliant registered against Facebook. Namoos-e-Risalat Lawyers Forum (NRLF) has submitted a First Information Report (FIR) at Margalla police station against Facebook and three other web sites.

We gave three applications: one against Payam TV for telecasting a movie ‘Yousaf’, one against Facebook and three other websites and one against the US embassy in Islamabad for organising a gathering of gays and lesbians.

Banning websites isn’t something new for Pakistan, India or for that matter in China. Pakistan for its part has blocked YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia back in 2010. India is leading a crusade to police the Internet by installing a watchdog under the UN. India has bullied Research in Motion to establish a server in India to read email messages passing through its servers. India brought Google to the courts where it was properly served a lesson on Internet and democracy.

China is another story where objectionable content is immediately censored. I heard words like democracy are filtered at the router level in China. India and Pakistan would sure want such capabilities but their democracies doesn’t let them have it.

How the Facebook saga in Pakistan ends up is a different matter. With these megaphones (Twitter and Facebook) in the hands of ants, everyone is finding it hard to contain information, let alone keep it a secret. Thanks to the democratic nature of these countries (India and Pakistan) they can’t act like China for very long. This is a tussle which will only persist.

Irrespective of what kind of bans are being imposed, be it blocking websites or filing FIR’s, it’s no longer an old ball game. The rules and the tools have changed.

Can any government successfully block these little megaphones?