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Pakistan Blocks YouTube Following Facebook Freeze

by Matthew Zuras on May 20, 2010 at 09:45 AM

facebook protest in pakistanJust yesterday we reported that a Pakistani court had ordered the government to block the country's access to Facebook in response to a contest to draw caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) directed ISPs to block the social networking site yesterday, but then followed immediately with a second order to block another mammoth Web community: YouTube.

Officials claimed that they tried to block individual URLs before initiating the network-wide ban, but "blasphemous content kept appearing." Wikipedia and Flickr have also been inaccessible in the country since last night. Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Pakistani ISP Nayatel, told Reuters that blocking the sites will cut up to a quarter of the country's Internet traffic.

Pakistan blocked YouTube for nearly a year back in 2007 for similar reasons. The PTA issued a statement today, saying that the organization would "welcome the concerned authorities of Facebook and YouTube to contact the PTA for resolving the issue at the earliest which ensures religious harmony and respect."

Some are worried that the move will backfire among young people, who most frequently use the sites. But the country's leaders are concerned that images of the Prophet Muhammad, which are forbidden in Islam, will cause anger and civil unrest, just as the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy from 2005 drew throngs of protesters and resulted in over fifty deaths. [From: Reuters]

Tags: cartoon, facebook, islam, jyllands-posten, muslim, nayatel, pakistan, pakistan telecommunication authority, PakistanTelecommunicationAuthority, ProphetMuhammad, top, youtube

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