Twitter site blocked in Pakistan over Prophet slur

The tweets were promoting a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, said Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication’s Authority.

Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet, even favourable ones, as blasphemous.

Mr Yaseen said yesterday that Facebook agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns about the competition, but officials have failed to get Twitter to do the same.

“We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,” he said.

Instructions to block the site came from Pakistan’s ministry of information technology.

A top court in Pakistan ordered a ban on Facebook in 2010 amid anger over a similar competition. The ban was lifted about two weeks later, after Facebook blocked the particular page in Pakistan.

Many people based in Pakistan continued to use Twitter yesterday despite the government’s move to block the website by using programs that disguise the user’s location. There was widespread criticism of the government’s action by those on Twitter, who tend to be more liberal than average Pakistanis.

“Another cheap moral stunt by Pakistan,” tweeted liberal columnist Nadeem Paracha.

The 2010 Facebook controversy sparked many in Pakistan’s liberal elite to question why Pakistanis could not be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to look at a website.