Pakistanis protest in Karachi yesterday against Facebook. Access to YouTube has now also been blocked. Photograph: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images
Some of the internet's most popular websites were blocked in Pakistan today as officials sought to restrict access to provocative images depicting the prophet Muhammad that many Muslims consider blasphemous, amid fears of possible street violence.
The government blocked the video-sharing website YouTube, one day after it banned Facebook, while users reported restrictions on Flickr and Wikipedia, prompting complaints from internet users but approval from angered protesters.
The censorship revolves around a Facebook competition that has attracted hundreds of images depicting the prophet Muhammad, including depictions of a bearded figure as a pig and wearing a bikini. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, which controls internet access, said it had blocked YouTube because some users were using the video site to repost the offending Facebook images.
BlackBerry service was also blocked for about 10 hours as government censors and mobile providers scrambled to find a way of blocking the offending pages without cutting off the entire internet.
The crackdown started on Tuesday after an Islamic lawyers' association won a court injunction, first against the offending web page and later against the entire Facebook site. It will be reviewed on 31 May.
Najibullah Malik, the civil servant heading the committee that implemented the ban, said it might be reviewed at a meeting next week. "We decided that this kind of information was going to hurt people's feelings. We have directed the PTA to block all and any sites that display those caricatures," he told the Guardian.
At one level, the controversy pits free speech fundamentalists in the west against religious extremists in Pakistan. Pakistani protesters accuse the government of crude censorship that is ineffectual because users can circumvent the restrictions through proxy servers.
Emails with instructions on how to find proxy servers swirled around Pakistani cyberspace from early morning. Many vented their anger on Twitter, which experienced a surge in demand from Pakistanis starved of social networking opportunities. "Way to go assholes. Why don't you just cut us off from the internet and get it over and done with," read one tweet.
Pakistan has about 20 million internet users, 2.5 million of whom are members of Facebook.
Government officials say they are acting pre-emptively to prevent a repeat of the 2006 cartoon riots that caused destruction of property and caused five deaths. But it was unclear whether the measures would satisfy the court or prevent disturbances.
Even after Facebook was banned yesterday, Islamist groups took to the streets, mounting minor protests. More are feared following weekly prayers tomorrow.
Inspired by an idea from a Seattle cartoonist, at least two Facebook pages are titled "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day", with combined membership of over 80,000 people and hundreds of controversial images. A website devoted to the idea has also been censored.
Although the pages claim to be upholding the right to free speech, many users are using them to spread images that crudely lampoon Islam or cause gratuitous offence to its followers.
The controversy poses a dilemma for Pakistan's minority liberals, many of whom oppose government censorship yet are also critical of western countries that allow the dissemination of hateful and potentially destabilising material.
Hasan Zaidi, a journalist and film-maker, said he and other internet users planned to file a court petition against the ban. "It's absurd," he said. "They haven't thought this through. The logical conclusion is that we should shut our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears and ban the entire internet, even email."
But Zaidi added that western countries with blasphemy laws protecting Christianity or preventing Holocaust denial were guilty of hypocrisy, and said he felt western rightwing extremists were using the controversy to heighten bigoted views.
"This sort of campaign to promote the right of free speech is very narrow minded and shallow," he said. "I'm not discounting that those images are offensive to the vast majority of people. My issue is with the [government's] solution."
Ref: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/20/pakistan-blocks-youtube-sacrilegious
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