Sacrilegious content: PTA blocks Wikipedia in Pakistan
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Saturday blocked access to the internet’s free and editable encyclopedia, “Wikipedia” in Pakistan, after it failed to remove offensive religious content.
The block comes after PTA had issued a final 48-hour notice to Wikipedia to remove sacrilegious content from their page.
But after it failed to comply with the order in the stipulated period, PTA completely blocked access to the website from Pakistan.
Apart form this PTA said that it had afforded Wikipedia an opportunity for a personal hearing with the telecommunication authority. But neither was the content was removed nor did any representative of Wikipedia appear for the hearing.
PTA officials said that the ban will be lifted, once the reported content is removed.
Notably, a large number of Wikipedia users in Pakistan are school, colleges and universities students.
It is also often seen that information on Wikipedia cannot be verified while the pages can also edited by users.
However, PTA had also issued notices to this website and even Google for defamatory content.
At one point, the PTA had banned YouTube in Pakistan for almost two years, due to the presence of offensive content.
In Pakistan, blasphemy remains a sensitive subject to which laws designed to deal with it have prescribed heavy punishments for perpetrators.
