The authorities gave the online encyclopedia until Friday evening to withdraw from its pages a content deemed as a damage to Islam.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
A countdown has been launched. The Pakistani telecommunications authority (PTA) announced on Wednesday that it has given Wikipedia until Friday February 3 in the evening to withdraw content deemed “blasphemous” from its online pages, threatening in the opposite case of cutting access to the site Internet on its territory. Authority did not give details on the content in question.
In the interval of the ultimatum, access to the participatory encyclopedia was restricted in the country, the latter operating only in “degraded” mode, said the PTA.
In Pakistan, defenders of freedom of expression have long criticized censorship imposed by the various governments and their control of the Internet and the media. H2>
In the past, social media giants have already been blocked for the same reason, in this Muslim country where the question of blasphemy is particularly sensitive. The same goes for certain pages of Wikipedia.
Access to Facebook was made impossible for two weeks in 2010 after the publication of supposedly blasphemous content. For its part, YouTube 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 2014, Twitter had accepted Pakistan’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”.
“The prohibition is disproportionate, unconstitutional and frankly ridiculous,” said Usama Khilji, a defender of digital rights, adding to the threat of prohibition by Wikipedia: “This will affect students, the university world, the health sector, researchers, and will limit the confidence of investors in Pakistan due to the uncertainty and arbitrariness of censorship. “