The country had given forty-eight hours to the online encyclopedia to delete content deemed blasphemous.
MO12345LEMONDE With AFP and Bloomberg
Pakistan made its threats: Friday, February 3, the Pakistani telecommunications authority (PTA) cut access to Wikipedia on its territory. The country had given forty-eight hours to the participatory encyclopedia to remove content deemed blasphemous. If the latter has removed part of the targeted texts in time, some remained online on the day of the ultimatum.
Wikipedia “will remain blocked until all the litigious content is deleted,” said a spokesperson for the PTA, who did not make the exact nature of the incriminated texts public. Usama Khilji, a defender of Pakistani digital rights, judges the blocking of unconstitutional Wikipedia. According to him, he is the result of “a concerted effort to exercise greater control over the content on the Internet”. “The main objective is to silence any dissent,” he told the Agency France-Presse (AFP), noting that “blasphemy is often used for this purpose”.
This is not the first time that Pakistan, a large Muslim majority, has been blocking important Internet services for religious reasons. In 2014, Twitter had accepted the country’s request by blocking access to content considered to be involved in Islam for the first time. More recently, the popular Tiktok video sharing platform has been blocked on several occasions in the country for content deemed “indecent” and “immoral”. YouTube, meanwhile, remained inaccessible from 2012 to 2016 due to an anti-Islam film, the broadcast of which had led to violence at the time which had led to the death of several people.
In a press release, the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia, estimated that the blockage “prevented the fifth most populated nation in the world from accessing the largest free knowledge benchmark (…) if that continues, it will also deprive The world of access to knowledge, history and culture of Pakistan “.